Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - German

This new collection investigates German literature in its international dimensions. While no single volume can deal comprehensively with such a vast topic, the nine contributors cover a wide historical range, with a variety of approaches and authors represented. Together, the essays begin to adumbrate the systematic nature of the relations between German national literature and world literature as these have developed through institutions, cultural networks, and individual authors.

In the last two decades, discussions of world literature--literature that resonates beyond its original...

Karl Philipp Moritz (d. 1793) was one of the most innovative writers of the late Enlightenment in Germany. A novelist, travel writer, editor, and teacher he is probably best known today for his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785 90) and for his treatises on aesthetics, foremost among them Uber die bildende Nachahmung des Schonen (On the Formative Imitation of the Beautiful), published in 1788. In this treatise, Moritz develops the concept of aesthetic autonomy, which became widely known after Goethe included a lengthy excerpt of it in his own Italian...

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual cliches about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the New Morality articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the New Woman.

Combining...

Children have occupied a prominent place in Yiddish literature since early modern times, but children s literature as a genre has its beginnings in the early 20th century. Its emergence reflected the desire of Jewish intellectuals to introduce modern forms of education, and promote ideological agendas, both in Eastern Europe and in immigrant communities elsewhere. Before the Second World War, a number of publishing houses and periodicals in Europe and the Americas specialized in stories, novels and poems for various age groups. Prominent authors such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Der Nister,...

In Lyric Orientations, Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. She focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Holderlin (1770 1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 1926). While Holderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believes in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They likewise share the conviction that such alienation cannot be...