Rainer Maria Rilke's early verse is often seen as having little relevance to the great achievement of the middle years, the Neue Gedichte . Yet the very different styles of the juvenilia and this new maturity are united by a preoccupation with processes of motion and growth which governs both his life and work. In this meticulous philological study, Ben Hutchinson reassesses every level of Rilke's early poetry, from its motives and metaphors to its very grammar and syntax, in order to trace what he terms a "poetics of becoming." With careful attention to rhythm, resonance and linguistic...

Tracing the stylistic self-conceptualization of modernism from Schopenhauer and Flaubert in the 1850s, through Nietzsche and the symbolists in the 1880s, to the high modernists of the 1920s, this book explores the far-reaching implications of Roland Barthes' claim that modern literature is "saturated with style." It offers both a broad, comparative survey of European modernism and an inventive re-reading of the major genres of the period, namely poetry, prose, and the manifesto. With reference to a wide range of canonical figures, including Aragon, Baudelaire, Eliot, Remy de Gourmont, Joyce,...

This book investigates the crucial question of 'restitution' in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald's oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics.
Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns...