In the spring of 1922, several months after completing Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote a fairy tale that was also a love story, inspired by the woman who was to become his second wife. That story, Pictor's Metamorphoses, is the centerpiece of this anthology of Hesse's luminous short fiction. Based on The Arabian Nights and the work of the Brothers Grimm, the nineteen stories collected here represent a half century of Hesse's short writings. They display the full range of Hesse's lifetime fascination with fantasy--as dream, fairy tale, satire, or allegory.
In the spring of 1922, several months after completing Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse wrote a fairy tale that was also a love story, inspired by ...
Using an illuminating method that challenges the popular notion of Romanticism as aesthetic escapism, Theodore Ziolkowski explores five institutions--mining, law, madhouses, universities, and museums--that provide the socio-historical context for German Romantic culture. He shows how German writers and thinkers helped to shape these five institutions, all of which assumed their modern form during the Romantic period, and how these social structures in turn contributed to major literary works through image, plot, character, and theme. "Ziolkowski cannot fail to impress the reader with a...
Using an illuminating method that challenges the popular notion of Romanticism as aesthetic escapism, Theodore Ziolkowski explores five institution...
Adam, Prometheus, and Faust--their stories were central to the formation of Western consciousness and continue to be timely cautionary tales in an age driven by information and technology. Here Theodore Ziolkowski explores how each myth represents a response on the part of ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, and sixteenth-century Christian culture to the problem of knowledge, particularly humankind's powerful, perennial, and sometimes unethical desire for it. This book exposes for the first time the similarities underlying these myths as well as their origins in earlier trickster legends, and...
Adam, Prometheus, and Faust--their stories were central to the formation of Western consciousness and continue to be timely cautionary tales in an ...
This book studies major works of literature from classical antiquity to the present that reflect crises in the evolution of Western law: the move from a prelegal to a legal society in The Eumenides, the Christianization of Germanic law in Njal's Saga, the disenchantment with medieval customary law in Reynard the Fox, the reception of Roman law in a variety of Renaissance texts, the conflict between law and equity in Antigone and The Merchant of Venice, the eighteenth-century codification controversy in the works of Kleist, the modern debate between "pure"...
This book studies major works of literature from classical antiquity to the present that reflect crises in the evolution of Western law: the move f...
"It is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era: philosophy, theology, law, natural science, medicine, and all other fields of intellectual endeavor. . . . Thoughtful students of the period well understand that 'Romanticism' is not merely a literary or aesthetic movement but, rather, a general climate of opinion." from the IntroductionIn a book certain to be of interest to readers in many disciplines, the distinguished scholar Theodore Ziolkowski shows how a strong impulse toward historical...
"It is not sufficiently appreciated, I believe, how profoundly Clio, the muse of history, permeated every aspect of thought during the Romantic era: p...
Why, Theodore Ziolkowski wonders, does Western literature abound with figures who experience a crucial moment of uncertainty in their actions? In this highly original and engaging work, he explores the significance of these unlikely heroes for literature and history.From Aeneas who wavered momentarily before plunging his sword into Turnus's chest to Hamlet, Orestes, Parzival, Wallenstein, and others, including Kafka's Josef K., Ziolkowski demonstrates that characters' private uncertainty reveals a classic opposition of binary forces. He describes how Aeneas, for example, was forced to choose...
Why, Theodore Ziolkowski wonders, does Western literature abound with figures who experience a crucial moment of uncertainty in their actions? In this...
"The reasons for the conspicuous popularity of Ovid his life as well as his works at the turn of the new millennium bear investigation. . . . This book speaks of the new bodies assumed in the twentieth century by the poems and tales to which Ovid gave their classic form including prominently the account of his own life, which has been hailed by many writers of our time as the archetype of exile. . . . I intend to suggest some of the reasons for Ovid's appeal to different writers and different generations." from the PrefaceTheodore Ziolkowski approaches Ovid's Latin poetry as a comparatist,...
"The reasons for the conspicuous popularity of Ovid his life as well as his works at the turn of the new millennium bear investigation. . . . This boo...
In Friedrich Durrenmatt's experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in North Africa. Her husband hires a woman named F. to reconstruct the unsolved crime in a documentary film. F. is soon unwittingly thrust into a paranoid world of international espionage where everyone is watched--including the watchers. After discovering a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband, F. becomes trapped in an apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, and...
In Friedrich Durrenmatt's experimental thriller The Assignment, the wife of a psychiatrist has been raped and killed near a desert ruin in Nort...
New plays and operas have often tried to upset the status quo or disturb the assumptions of theatre audiences. Yet, as this study explores, the reactions of the audience or of the authorities are often more extreme than the creators had envisaged, to include outrage, riots, protests or censorship. Scandal on Stage looks at ten famous theater scandals of the past two centuries in Germany and France as symptoms of contemporary social, political, ethical, and aesthetic upheavals. The writers and composers concerned, including Schiller, Stravinsky, Strauss, Brecht and Weil, portrayed new artistic...
New plays and operas have often tried to upset the status quo or disturb the assumptions of theatre audiences. Yet, as this study explores, the reacti...
