A poet whose verse inspired music by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was in his lifetime equally admired for his elegant prose. This collection charts the development of that prose, beginning with three meditative works from the Travel Pictures, inspired by Heine's journeys as a young man to Lucca, Venice and the Harz Mountains. Exploring the development of spirituality, the later On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany spans the earliest religious beliefs of the Germanic people to the philosophy of Hegel, and warns with startling...

Focusing on Kafka's sense of Jewish identity and knowledge of Judaism, Robertson elucidates the subtle but profound ways in which Jewish religion and culture influenced Kafka's work.

This book is an erudite literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts, Ritchie Robertson offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. No other study by a single author deals with German-Jewish relations so comprehensively and over such a long period of literary history.

Key dimensions of Thomas Mann's writing and life are explored in this collection of specially commissioned essays. In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction and the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's oeuvre in relation to major themes. A final chapter looks at the pitfalls of translating Mann into English. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading.

Key dimensions of Thomas Mann's writing and life are explored in this collection of specially commissioned essays. In addition to introductory chapters on all the main works of fiction and the essays and diaries, there are four chapters examining Mann's oeuvre in relation to major themes. A final chapter looks at the pitfalls of translating Mann into English. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading.

Early in the twentieth century, Yiddish, previously stigmatized as a corrupt jargon, came to be recognized as a language in its own right, and one moreover that was already the vehicle for a rich literature. Many writers in other European languages steadily became aware of the status and richness of the Yiddish language, sometimes by encountering Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Europe, and they responded to Yiddish language and culture in their own works, while Yiddish writers adopted, and sometimes anticipated, modern trends in other European literatures known to them. The collection...

This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s. While mock-heroic poetry is a parodistic counterpart to serious epic, mock-epic poetry starts by parodying epic but moves on to much wider and richer literary explorations; it relies heavily on intertextual allusion to other works, on narratorial irony, on the sympathetic and sometimes libertine presentation of sexual relations, and on a range of satirical devices. It includes well-known texts (Pope's Dunciad, Byron's Don Juan, Heine's Atta Troll) and others which are little known (Ratschky's...

Focusing on the cultural encounters between European explorers and non-European peoples, the author reconstructs the experiences of both sides in case studies that span five continents.

20th-century Austrian literature boasts many outstanding writers: Schnitzler, Musil, Rilke, Kraus, Celan, Canetti, Bernhard, Jelinek. These and others feature in broader accounts of German literature, but it is desirable to see how the Austrian literary scene -- and Austrian society itself -- shaped their writing. This volume thus surveys Austrian writers of drama, prose fiction, and lyric poetry; relates them to the distinctive history of modern Austria, a democratic republic that was overtaken by civil war and authoritarian rule, absorbed into Nazi Germany, and re-established as a neutral...

The Birdsong Papers, which appeared in 1896 as Die Akten des Vogelsangs, was Wilhelm Raabe's next-to-last completed narrative. What might be called an anti-Bildungsroman, it is widely considered to be the work that secures Raabe's place as a precursor of German modernist fiction writers. Its tone is critical of late-nineteenth-century society, both German and American, with its industrial expansion, urbanization, pursuit of wealth, and erosion of conventional values; but this critical tone also produces an uneasy tension for its narrator, Karl Krumhardt, a high-ranking bureaucrat with a stake...