Influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche, and inspired by stays in Italy and France, as well as travels to Russia, Spain, and North Africa, Rainer Maria Rilke nevertheless sought desperately to be original. He rejected all -idees recues, - whether they were of God, reality, or literature, instead creating his own absolute. He searched for the -real, - re-formed German poetry, and revolutionized Western narrative prose with Malte Laurids Brigge. While Rilke s work is marked by two cesuras, after which it displays important advances in diction and the figuration of verbal icons, it becomes ever more...

Heinrich von Kleist s problematic relationship with the philosophy and the aesthetics of idealism informs his parodic, rebellious, and destructive uvre. This book focuses on this relationship and examines Kleist s female leading characters and their role as amorphous ciphers for his own subversive aesthetic theory. Through parody these characters call into question idealist philosophy regarding truth, knowledge, and gender, and offer a theory of aesthetic representation that replaces traditional binary oppositions with pluralities and nonclosure. Nietzsche may have opened the door to...

The essays in Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l il: Interdisciplinary Perspectives investigate the subject of deception and falsehood from various perspectives. Classical, modernist and postmodern texts and art forms, both visual and performative, are examined in frames of reference that range from aesthetics and literary theory to cognitive science. In some cases, deception and falsehood are seen to have positive connotations, and, in other cases, their negative dimensions are highlighted. The complexity of these terms and their relationship with truth and truthfulness are put on display...

This unique work of scholarship explores contemporary issues of male spectatorship and the importance of biography for art criticism in the work of Tracy Chevalier, Eunice Lipton, Anna Banti, Kate Braverman, and Susan Vreeland. Drawing upon feminist concepts on the male and female gaze, Dr. Cortney Cronberg Barko perceptively examines how these authors challenge androcentric models of reading by demonstrating women s powers as readers and writers. This intriguing study reveals that authors working within the genre of fictionalized biographies of women painters reconstruct art history to...

Literature and Error comprises a series of essays from French scholars who seek to lay down the foundations of a literary theory that would argue for the productivity of errors (and mistakes) in literary works.

By situating Gustav Meyrink on the periphery of social and spiritual spheres and by identifying the sleepwalker as a seminal figure of the period as well as in Meyrink's work, Somnambulistic Lucidity echoes Meyrink's own attempts to find lucidity in the ambiguity of somnambulism.

This study posits that ekphrasis and dream interpretation are similar due to both analyzing a visual image and attempting to translate the visual into the verbal in order to gain a better and more complete understanding of it.