The turn of the twentieth century was a time of identity crisis for the upper and middle classes, one in which increased social mobility caused the blurring of traditional boundaries and created a need for reference works such as the British Who's Who (1897). At the same time, the rise of a new leisure industry and an increase in international travel led to a boom period for confidence men, who frequently operated in hotels and holiday resorts. Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, written between 1910-13 and continued (though never completed) in 1951-54, uses contemporary accounts of these figures as a...

A special double issue of "Publications of the English Goethe Society" to celebrate the 70th birthday of Professor Martin Swales (UCL, UK)
This volume collects papers from a conference held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in October 2010. The conference aimed to analyse how literary texts articulate (and give voice to) ideas and ideologies. In contrast to most philosophy, literature rarely makes claims to systematic conceptual rigour. Literary statements are always conjectural; they are also conditioned by the conventions of the genre in which they are made.
Because...

Georg Buchner: Contemporary Perspectives examines the continuing relevance of Buchner in the early twenty-first century in terms of politics, science, philosophy, aesthetics, cultural studies and performance studies. It situates Buchner s interdisciplinary work in relation to the philosophical, scientific and religious discourses of his time, while also investigating the ways in which Buchner s intersectional writings anticipated sometimes uncannily questions and problems which were to become central concerns in modernism and after. The nineteen essays in the book, some in English and...

Argues on the evidence of nine major German novels that literature and business have in common a reliance on language, understood in a creative, performative, and rhetorical sense.