This volume provides an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama, philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. Following the editors' introduction,...

-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...

Franz Kafka is one of the most widely taught, and read, writers in world literature. Readers encountering texts like 'The Metamorphosis' and The Trial for the first time are frequently perplexed by his often intentionally weird writing. Some might say that Kafka's enduring achievement has been to make his readers love being perplexed. As much of Kafka's writing is designed to perplex the reader, this guide helps the reader understand why and how perplexity has been deliberately created by Kafka's text and to realize what the uses of such perplexity might be. The book guides readers through...

Legendary Figures examines revolutionary views of the past that have played a crucial role in European and American literature of the last 150 years. Clayton Koelb traces these new approaches to history through an impressive range of novels, from Flaubert s Salammbo to Christa Wolf s Cassandra.

Koelb argues that this new historical sense, which arose in the mid nineteenth century, gained eloquent expression in Flaubert s writings. What is crucial about the new historical sense is that it views the past as essentially alien and other. The connection between past and...

Possibly the ultimate coming-of-age drama. The play follows a group of high-school friends in Victorian-age Germany who begin to experience their first sexual desires in a world where even talking about sex is taboo. Each struggles to travel the route from childhood to adulthood without a roadmap. Along the way they touch the heights of elation and the depths of despair while being forced to confront the problems of lust, sadism, masochism, rape, abortion, and homosexuality. Some survive the journey, others do not. Funny and horrifying by turns, the play explores the budding of those basic...