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...

Islands, both literal and figurative, recur in fiction authored by many prominent Canadian women writers. Using a critical lens based on Northrop Frye and Julia Kristeva, this book closely examines fourteen novels by eight twentieth-century authors, emphasizing works by L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood. Several of the novels, such as Montgomery s Anne of Green Gables, Laurence s A Jest of God and The Diviners, Atwood s Surfacing and Bodily Harm, Alice Munro s The Lives of Girls and Women, and Gabrielle Roy s The Tin...