Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference still resonate in the -social constructivism- of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct -identities- or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. Powell's term -the Technological Unconscious- refers both to the intersection between...

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) is Austria's most important nineteenth-century woman writer, but her works have remained largely unknown to English speakers, even her most important, the compelling Their Pavel, first published serially in 1887. Based on a true incident, Their Pavel investigates the troubled social relations of a Moravian village that is endowed with the right of local governance but steeped in the habits of its feudal relationship to the local barony. The novel explores the parallel fates of the children of a hanged murderer and thief. Milada, the appealing and alert...

The wanderer is an indispensable part of the German cultural imaginary. The nineteenth-century prominence of the motif owes much to the self-conception of the intellectual pioneers of the day as wanderers. The motif is also a key to interpretation of the social and cultural phenomena of a turbulent century that began with the emancipatory claims of the Enlightenment and ended in untrammeled industrialism. Writers from Goethe to Buchner, Fontane to Holtei were keenly aware of the motif's interpretive value, attempting to grasp with it not only such developments as mass migration and...

Rilke's great cycle of ten elegies, perhaps his most profound poetic achievement, had its inception on the morning of January 21, 1912, but was interrupted by the First World War and not completed until a decade later. The Duino Elegies are not only the result of an extraordinary kind of contact with the unseen world; they are an attempt to understand that world in its holistic relationship to the visible, tangible world. This powerful rendering of the cycle is a product of the collaboration between a poet, Norris, and a Germanist, Keele.

Joseph Roth was one of the most significant German-language writers of the interwar period, yet few major studies of his work have been published in English. Kati Tonkin's monograph spans Roth's novelistic career, challenging the widely held assumption that his writing can be divided into an early -socialist- and a later -monarchist- phase: that his late novels Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft are deeply nostalgic, presenting an idealized picture of the Habsburg Empire, a -backward-turned utopia.- In contrast, Tonkin reads the later works not as escapist but as attempts to grasp the...

-What is not Life that really is?- asked Coleridge, struggling, like many poets, philosophers, and scientists of Europe's Romantic age, to formulate a theory of life that explained the mysterious relation between dead material bodies and living, animate beings. Romantic intellectuals found a key to this mystery surprisingly close at hand: the process by which dead matter could come to life must be something like the process of reading. The Revivifying Word examines the reanimating acts of reading that became a central focus of attention for Romantic writers. German theorists, building on the...

The German novelist Martin Walser's 1998 speech upon accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade remains a milestone in recent German efforts to come to terms with the Nazi past. The day after the speech, Ignatz Bubis, leader of Germany's Jewish community, attacked Walser for inciting dangerous right-wing sentiment with controversial passages including the notorious statement -Auschwitz is not suited to be a moral bludgeon, - thus igniting the protracted public battle of opinions known as the -Walser-Bubis Debate.- The speech continues to loom large in Germany's struggle to acknowledge...

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of the great names of the classical age of German literature. One of the last universalists, he wrote on aesthetics, literary history and theory, historiography, anthropology, psychology, education, and theology; translated and adapted poetry from ancient Greek, English, Italian, even from Persian and Arabic; collected folk songs from around the world; and pioneered a better understanding of non-European cultures. A student of Kant's, he became Goethe's mentor in Strasbourg, and was a mastermind of the Sturm und Drang and a luminary of classical...

Although Rainer Maria Rilke and his work have been much studied and written about over the past century -- as befits the perhaps most important German-language poet of modern times -- certain aspects of his early life and career have been neglected or are in need of a fresh look. Accordingly, this book investigates Rilke's life and career from adolescence until the verge of thirty. Here the reader finds the hysterical, harried tutee clinging to Valerie von Rhonfeld; the clever, supercilious, and anxious stroller through Prague of Larenopfer; the narcissistic diarist preening for Lou...

In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, expulsions of -ethnic- Germans, mass rapes of German women, and postwar internment and persecution. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's The Air War and Literature and Grass's Crabwalk are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance German victimhood and German perpetration....