Comparative literature Books

Book SynopsisCharting the early dissemination of Shakespeare in the Nordic countries in the 19th century, this opens up an area of global Shakespeare studies that has received little attention to date. With case studies exploring the earliest translations of Hamlet into Danish; the first translation of Macbeth and the differing translations of Hamlet into Swedish; adaptations into Finnish; Kierkegaard's re-working of King Lear, and the reception of the African-American actor Ira Aldridge's performances in Stockholm as Othello and Shylock, it will appeal to all those interested in the reception of Shakespeare and its relationship to the political and social conditions.The volume intervenes in the current discussion of global Shakespeare and more recent concepts like rhizome', which challenge the notion of an Anglocentric model of centre' versus periphery'. It offers a new assessment of these notions, revealing how the dissemination of Shakespeare is determined by a seriesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction Nely Keinänen and Per Sivefors 1: The First Danish Production of Hamlet (1813): A Theatrical Representation of a National Crisis Annelis Kuhlmann (Aarhus University, Denmark) 2: Geijer’s Macbeth – Page, Stage and the Seeds of Time Kiki Lindell (Lund University, Sweden) and Kent Hägglund (Stockholm University, Sweden) 3: Cold Maids and Dead Men: Gender in Translation and Transition in Hamlet Cecilia Lindskog Whiteley (Uppsala University, Sweden) 4: The Poetics of Adaptation and Politics of Domestication: Macbeth and J. F. Lagervall’s Ruunulinna Jyrki Nummi, Eeva-Liisa Bastman and Erika Laamanen (all University of Helsinki, Finland) 5: Søren Kierkegaard’s Adaptation Of King Lear James Newlin (Case Western Reserve University, USA) 6: ‘A blot on Swedish hospitality’: Ira Aldridge’s Visit to Stockholm in 1857 Per Sivefors (Linnaeus University, Sweden) 7: Shakespeare’s Legacy and Aleksis Kivi: Rethinking Kivi’s Drama Karkurit [The Fugitives] Riitta Pohjola-Skarp (University of Tampere, Finland) 8: Anne Charlotte Leffler’s Shakespeare: The Perils of Stardom and Everyday Life Lynn R. Wilkinson (University of Texas, USA) 9: Knut Hamsun’s Criticism of Shakespeare Martin Humpál (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic) Afterword: Towards a Regional Methodology of Culture Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University, USA) Appendix: Nordic Shakespeare until 1900: A Timeline Index

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Book SynopsisAaron Mauro is Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Brock University, Canada.Trade ReviewOpen, accessible, engaging, energetic, and enthusing – Hacking in the Humanitiesexplores essential impulses of today’s digital humanities in the context of their intellectual foundations, their current possibilities, and their necessary reflection of and in the human condition. * Ray Siemens, University of Victoria, Canada *Not just a ‘how to’ book, this is a ‘why to do it’ book for anyone who seriously uses digital tools for research. Important for those who analyze how things work in the digital realm, especially for academics in the humanities and social sciences, this book goes way beyond simple rules and delves into the deeper sources, and implications, of digital (in)security. Any careful cyborg (and we are all cyborgs!), needs to read this book. It is a matter of our digital well-being, which is just as important as our biological health. * Chris Hables Gray, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Human Exploits: An Introduction to Hacking and the Humanities 2. “Hack the Planet”: Pop Hackers and the Demands of a Real World Resistance 3. Academic Attack Surfaces: Culture Jamming the Future and XML Bombs 4. Supply Chain Attacks and Knowledge Networks: Network Sovereignty and the Interplanetary Internet 5.Cryptographic Agility and the Right to Privacy: Secret Writing and the Cypherpunks 6. Biohacking and Autonomous Androids: Human Evolution and Biometric Data 7. Gray Hat Humanities: Surveillance Capitalism, Object Oriented Ontology, and Design Fiction Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“Brian Doherty’s Dirty Pictures is coming out right when it’s needed. As creative expression is increasingly attacked from across the political spectrum, this wonderful book is a reminder of how art, unrestricted and free, helps us process the mess. It’s impeccably researched, sharply written, and opens a portal back to that old, weird America that found its mind by losing it a little.” -- Reid Mitenbuler, author of Wild Minds: The Artists and Rivalries That Inspired the Golden Age of Animation“Tune in, read on, and know all. Brian Doherty's heroic and hilarious Dirty Pictures is a detail-rich history with insight from the giants—Robert Crumb through Art Spiegelman. The story of underground comix is not just important, it's as American as an apple pie laced with LSD.” -- Kliph Nesteroff, author of We Had a Little Real Estate Problem and The ComediansIn order to develop the vast field of indie comics available today, where every style and subject under the sun is available to a reader, you need the foundation laid by the underground comix scene of the 60s and 70s. In Dirty Pictures, author Brian Doherty expertly details the players and events that led to an artistic renaissance. -- Ho Che Anderson, creator of King, Sand & Fury, and Godhead“Dirty Pictures is a fascinating deep dig into a unique subculture populated by screwball eccentrics, whose rude, jarring, and far-out works of art changed the face of American humor in all its incarnations.” -- Gregg Turkington, comedian/actor (Entertainment, Ant-Man, On Cinema at the Cinema)". . .given the exponential reach of this initially tiny cluster of transgressive artists, Doherty’s book is a welcome addition to an under-analyzed legacy of the free-spirited 1960s.” -- James Sullivan * San Francisco Chronicle *"A free-wheeling, frank account of the rise and fall of the underground comic scene. . . . Lively, well researched, and full of telling anecdotes; just the thing for comix aficionados and collectors.” * Kirkus Reviews *As Doherty entertainingly traces the movement’s rise—from its humble beginnings in the 1960s to its uphill battle to be recognized as an art form—he captures how it perfectly reflected the rapidly changing norms of the baby boomer generation and its enduring impact on pop culture today. Comix fans and artists should make room on their shelves for this one. * Publishers Weekly *...shines a light on a corner of the comics business that still hasn't received its due . . . If this topic interests you at all, Dirty Pictures is likely to be the most complete and authoritative account we’re going to get. -- Rob Salkowitz * ICv2 *Dirty Pictures is a riveting look at the raunchy history of underground comix -- Thom Dunn * Boing Boing *The book is simply the best and most comprehensive look at underground comics published to date. -- Alex Dueben * Smash Pages *Indispensable. * Shelf Awareness, starred review *An immense work of comics fandom and a labor of love ... the most far-reaching history of underground comix that anyone will ever likely write. -- Keith A. Gordon * Book & Film Globe *

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Book SynopsisA polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts. Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from Europe and North America. In Modernism after Postcolonialism, Mara de Gennaro undertakes a comparative Anglophone-Francophone study, invoking theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Spivak, Édouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. Examining transnational poetics of comparison that contest the comparative practices of colonialist, racist, and ethno-nationalist discourses, the book treats these poetics as models for a creolist critical method of reading, one that searches out unpredictable, mutually generative textual relations obscured by geographic and linguistic divides. In each chapter, de Gennaro pairs a canonical English-language modernist writer (Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. M. ForsTrade ReviewMara de Gennaro's study is ambitious and impressive. It pursues a rich variety of ideas, it chooses texts for reasons familiar to modernist and postcolonial scholars but pairs them in surprising ways, and its innovative close readings justify these pairings.—Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Comparative Literature StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Anxious Mastery and the Forms It TakesChapter 1. Troubling Classifications: Unspeakable Figures of Métissage in "Melanctha" and DisgraceChapter 2. Troubling Sovereignties: Intimations of Relation in The Waste Land and Cahier d'un retour au pays natalChapter 3. Traversing Bounds of Historical Memory: Dethroning the Narrator and Creolizing Testimony in A Passage to India and Texaco Chapter 4. Traversing Bounds of Solidarity: Poor Analogies and Painful Negotiations in Three Guineas and The Farming of BonesConclusion. The Beauty of a Trembling WorldNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts. Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from Europe and North America. In Modernism after Postcolonialism, Mara de Gennaro undertakes a comparative Anglophone-Francophone study, invoking theoretical frameworks from Gayatri Spivak, Édouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. Examining transnational poetics of comparison that contest the comparative practices of colonialist, racist, and ethno-nationalist discourses, the book treats these poetics as models for a creolist critical method of reading, one that searches out unpredictable, mutually generative textual relations obscured by geographic and linguistic divides. In each chapter, de Gennaro pairs a canonical English-language modernist writer (Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, E. M. ForsTrade ReviewMara de Gennaro's study is ambitious and impressive. It pursues a rich variety of ideas, it chooses texts for reasons familiar to modernist and postcolonial scholars but pairs them in surprising ways, and its innovative close readings justify these pairings.—Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Comparative Literature StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Anxious Mastery and the Forms It TakesChapter 1. Troubling Classifications: Unspeakable Figures of Métissage in "Melanctha" and DisgraceChapter 2. Troubling Sovereignties: Intimations of Relation in The Waste Land and Cahier d'un retour au pays natalChapter 3. Traversing Bounds of Historical Memory: Dethroning the Narrator and Creolizing Testimony in A Passage to India and Texaco Chapter 4. Traversing Bounds of Solidarity: Poor Analogies and Painful Negotiations in Three Guineas and The Farming of BonesConclusion. The Beauty of a Trembling WorldNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book examines poets and artists in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how they worked to make language into material objects and material objects into language.

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Book SynopsisProvides the first book-length analysis of modernism and the Anthropocene.

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length literary-geographical study of late modernist poetry.

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Book SynopsisShows that Faust was a central influence on Tennyson's creative life.Trade Review"An outstanding work of literary-historical scholarship" -John T. Hamilton, Harvard University

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Book SynopsisA comparative literary history that explores Robert Louis Stevenson and French literature.

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Book SynopsisMaps of Empire examines how literature was affected by the decay and break up of old models of imperial administration in the mid-twentieth century.Table of ContentsPreface: Cartography and the Space of World Literature 1. A Portmanteau of the Nation in Imīl Habībī’s The Pessoptimist 2. The Literary Space of Authority in Camara Laye’s Le Regard du Roi 3. Imperial Palimpsest or Exquisite Corpse: Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence 4. Disorientation and Horror in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl 5. Orality and the Space of Translation in the Pima Ant Songs Afterword: Decolonizing Literary Space Bibliography

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Book SynopsisSpanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today's avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation. Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century.Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the cTrade ReviewThis volume defies the legendary sense of formal closure associated with the sonnet to show how that form has thrived in translation, and how sonnets have occasioned transformations and reinventions in other media. Contributors range from theorists of translation and poetics to poets and practicing translators, giving the book a commanding breadth and facilitating lively conversations across the chapters. * Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, USA *While the sonnet is often described as closed or fixed in form, the essays in this collection reveal it to be 'a migrant genre,' defined by its openness to travel and translation, and often used to defy political and social oppression. Deft and lucid essays range across subjects from Petrarch, Spenser, Rilke, the OuLiPo group, to Soviet dissidents, contemporary Singaporean poets and recent settings of Vivaldi. Migration and Mutation brings together scholars, translators and poets to show how this travelling form has been adapted or transposed to other languages, media, subjects and styles. * Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Reader in Early Modern Literature, King’s College London, UK *Table of ContentsForeword David Duff, Queen Mary University of London, UK Introduction Carole Birkan-Berz, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France Part One: Revisiting early modern circulations 1. Poetic furor in translation: Spenser's and Sylvester's sonnet collections Padraic Lamb, University of Lyon, France 2. The fashioning of English anti-Petrarchism: Spenser and Shakespeare remembering Du Bellay Line Cottegnies, Université Sorbonne, France 3. ‘Translated out of Ronsard'?: A misattributed translation of Petrarch’s RVF 48 by Sir John Borough Guillaume Coatalen, CY Cergy Paris University, France 4. Paving the way for Opitz: The first German sonnets at the crossroads of European circulation networks, 1556-1604 Elisabeth Rothmund, Université Sorbonne, France Part Two: Sonnet translation as a space for poetic imagination 5. Keats’s sonnets and the translation process: Mediation, conversion and response Oriane Monthéard, University of Rouen, France 6. On translating Les Chimères by Gérard de Nerval Peter Valente, Independent Scholar 7. Reshaping Rilke: A comparative approach to the latest translations of Die Sonette an Orpheus into English Frédéric Weinmann, Independent Scholar 8. Fernando Pessoa's sonnets - dislocations in form, persona and language Carlos A. Pitella, Centre for Theatre Studies of the University of Lisbon, Portugal 9. English sonnet spaces in Jacques Roubaud's Churchill 40 Thea Petrou, Independent Scholar 10. Lyrical gestures: The essence of the form and the spirit of the translated text in Don Paterson’s ‘versions’ of sonnets Bastien Goursaud, UPEC Université Paris Est Créteil, France Part Three: Sonnet migrations across and outside Europe: Translating as a political act 11. Translation and transnationalism: Reframing the contemporary Irish sonnet Erin Cunningham, Independent Scholar 12. Sonnet translation and imitation during the Second World War: Maintaining the idea of Europe? Thomas Vuong, Independent Scholar 13.Translating Genrikh Sapgir’s Sonnets on Shirts Dmitri Manin, Independent Scholar 14. The vulgar eloquence of Singaporean sonnets Tse Hao Guang, Independent Scholar Part Four: Cross-media adaptations and beyond 15. On the theatricality of the Canzoniere, from medieval to modern times Jean-Luc Nardone, Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, France 16. Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes: An attempt to exhaust the sonnet Natalie Berkman, SAE Institute, Paris, France 17. The Four Seasons in flux: Translating the sonnets from Vivaldi's score in relation to performances by Nigel Kennedy Paul Munden, University of Leeds, UK, and University of Canberra, Australia, and Anouska Zummo, Independent Scholar 18. Debating sonnet translation in the Soviet and post-Soviet era: Rethinking and transforming the Russian sonnet Alexander Markov, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWe describe people who are consumed or devoured by ambition as if by a predator or an out-of-control inferno. Thinkers since deepest antiquity have raised these questions, approaching the subject of ambition with ambivalence and often trepidationas when the ancient Greek poet Hesiod proposed a differentiation between the good and the bad goddess Eris. Indeed, ambition as a longing for immortal fame seems to be one of the unique hallmarks of the human species. While philosophy has touched only occasionally on the problem of burning ambition, sociology, psychoanalysis, and world literature have provided rich and more revealing descriptions and examples of its shaping role in human history. Drawing on a long and varied tradition of writing on this topic, ranging from the works of Homer through Shakespeare, Freud, and Kafka and from the history of ancient Greece and Rome to the Italian Renaissance and up to the present day (to modernity and the current neoliberal era), Eckart Goebel Trade ReviewGoebel's book is an eloquent study of a chatoyant term and a timeless phenomenon. A brilliantly written essay that argues historically while teaching readers to turn to their own striving in a truly enlightened manner. * Andreas Beyer, Professor for the History of Art, Universität Basel, Switzerland *Eckart Goebel’s Ambition is a tour de force, tracking the complex and circuitous history of the concept through a series of profound analyses and offering inspired and provocative reflections of what has driven, haunted, and debilitated individuals and societies across the millennia. * John T. Hamilton, Harvard University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction I. Semantics of Ambition II. Eris - Agon - Ambition III. Ambition in Modernity 1. A New Era of Ambition (Jacob Burckhardt) 2. The Ambition of Equals (Alexis de Tocqueville) 3. Critique of Success (Gustav Ichheiser) 4. Critique of Contemplation (Karl Mannheim) 5. The Ambitious Spoilsport (Roger Caillois) 6. Hesiod’s Return in the Achieving Society (David McClelland) 7. Burning Ambition (Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler) The Ambition to Reject Ambition: An Afterword with a View to Montaigne Index

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Book SynopsisBreaking with linearity the ruling narrative model in the Jewish-Christian tradition since the ancient world many 20th-century European writers adopted circular narrative forms. Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez shows this trend was not a unified nor conscious movement, but rather a series of works arising sporadically in different countries at different times, using a variety of circular structures to express similar concerns and ideas about the world. This study also shows how the renewed understanding of narrative form leading to this circular trend was anticipated by Nietzsche's critiques of truth, knowledge, language and metaphysics, and especially by his related discussions of nihilism and the eternal recurrence. Starting with an analysis of the theory and genealogy of linear narrative, the author charts the emergence of Nietzsche's idea of eternal return, before then turning to the history of the circular narrative trend. This history is explored from its inception, in the works of Trade ReviewIn this groundbreaking work, Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez retraces the teleological view of literature through a wide expanse of texts, both narrative and of literary criticism – from Homer to Aristotle, Tasso and Schiller – before delineating how certain authors of modern literature rejected linearity in favour of circular forms of narrative. Built on Nietzschean philosophy, particularly on his idea of eternal recurrence, the book’s close engagement with writers and dramatists, ranging from Strindberg to Nabokov, Joyce, Borges and Calvino, radically reconfigures the aesthetics grounding these texts. This brilliant account adds an important dimension to the evolution of the Western narrative. * Thirthankar Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India, and co-editor of Samuel Beckett as World Litertature *Far from a mere typology, Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature is both ambitious in scope and quite original in dealing with its central premise. Toribio Vazquez offers a personal attempt to present and understand the many different circular alternatives probed by the 20th-century writers under the spell of Nietzsche’s negative philosophy, a milestone for the contemporary collapse of linearity. His close readings compose an engaging picture of modernism(s) in Europe, sensitive to singularities and also particularly attentive of non-canonical names, such as Azorín and Kharns. A fine, comprehensive study, theory and analysis concerned. * Fábio de Souza Andrade, Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo, Brazil *In this wide-ranging comparative study Toribio Vazquez extends our understanding of post-Nietzschean poetics. His corpus of canonical and non-canonical 20th-century writers exploit structures of circularity for a variety of purposes, from the axiological and psychological to the existential and self-referential. This is an ambitious and impressive piece of work. * Duncan Large, Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia, UK *Table of ContentsForeword by Shane Weller (University of Kent, UK) Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: The Genealogy of Linearity 2. Nietzsche’s Bequest: Buddha’s Shadow and the ‘Greatest Burden’ 3. The Birth of Circularity: Strindberg, Stein and Azorín 4. ‘Vivir es Volver’: Queneau, Nabokov and Kharms 5. Circulus Vitiosus Litterae: Joyce, Borges and the Theatre of the Absurd 6. Circular Echoes: Robbe-Grillet, Calvino, Cortázar and Blanchot 7. Conclusion: Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature References Index

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Book SynopsisThomas Mann arrived in Princeton in 1938, in exile from Nazi Germany, and feted in his new country as the greatest living man of letters. This beautiful new book from literary critic Stanley Corngold tells the little known story of Mann's early years in America and his encounters with a group of highly gifted émigrés in Princeton, which came to be called the Kahler Circle, with Mann at its center. The Circle included immensely creative, mostly German-speaking exiles from Nazism, foremost Mann, Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein, all of whom, during the Circle's nascent years in Princeton, were stupendously productive.In clear, engaging prose, Corngold explores the traces the Circle left behind during Mann's stay in Princeton, treating literary works and political statements, anecdotes, contemporary history, and the Circle's afterlife. Weimar in Princeton portrays a fascinating scene of cultural production, at a critical juncture in the 20th century, and the experiTrade ReviewWeimar in Princeton is an authoritative, stylistically adroit, fully engaged work that, with a subtle wit, guides readers in the most pleasant way across an ideal university campus. … It is a new, irreplaceable standard work on Thomas Mann's intellectual biography and a major contribution to transatlantic literary history. (Bloomsbury translation) * Monatshefte *The real magician here is Stanley Corngold, who has pulled Weimar in Princeton: Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle out of his Mind in Exile hat. With the focus on Mann’s brother exiles in Princeton—Erich Kahler, Hermann Broch, and Albert Einstein--the book has been released in the Bloomsbury series, New Directions in German Studies. -- Stuart Mitchner * Town Topics Newspaper *With verve, elegance, and inimitable wit, Corngold provides indispensable insights into the crucial first phase of Thomas Mann’s American exile by focusing on the electrifying circle of artists, intellectuals, and scientists at Erich Kahler’s home in Princeton. Astonishingly rich in ramifications, Weimar in Princeton is an eminently readable and inspiring exploration of this most luminous collective caught within the century’s darkest epoch. * John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA *Stanley Corngold’s brilliantly nuanced book is a pendant to his The Mind in Exile and completes his in-depth exploration of this important part of Thomas Mann’s intellectual journey. This account of Mann’s everyday intercourse with figures like Einstein, Hermann Broch, and especially Erich Kahler is enlightened and enlivened by Corngold’s sly wit and engagingly elicits the civility, intellectual breadth, and sense of community Mann experienced during the Princeton years. Corngold writes for the “happy few” who relish the life and works of Thomas Mann. Weimar in Princeton will surely enlarge that fortunate circle. * Ruth V. Gross, Professor of German and Head, North Carolina State University, USA *Zeroing in on a particular place during a brief moment of time, Stanley Corngold uncovers a wealth of cultural, political and personal interactions never before adequately explored. The specific grain of sand in which he discovers this forgotten world is Princeton, New Jersey between 1938 and 1941, where a remarkable group of Central European exiles coalesced around the towering figures of Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Hermann Broch, and Erich Kahler. Corngold fashions a moving and insightful account of their struggles to cope with the loss of their old culture and meet the challenges of the new. Weimar in Princeton is a sprightly, always engaging micro-narrative of a unique moment in twentieth-century trans-Atlantic intellectual history. * Martin Jay, Ehrman Professor of European History Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, USA *Table of ContentsPreface Abbreviations for Citations Introduction 1. Thomas Mann in Princeton 2. Erich von Kahler: Mann’s Best Friend 3. Hermann Broch in Princeton 4. Mann and Einstein 5. Goethe and the Circle 6. Did Einstein Read Kafka’s Castle on Mann's Recommendation? Towards a Conclusion Appendix 1: A Chronicle, with Commentary Appendix 2: Lili Kahler Remembers. Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisEscape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what has emerged as perhaps the central theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escapefrom the commodified present, from directionless history, from moral deathat a time of inescapable globalization. The driving question is how to find an alternative to the world within the world, at a time when utopian and messianic ideals have lost their power to compel belief. John Limon traces the American answer to that question in the writings of some of the most important authors of the last two decadesChabon, Diaz, Foer, Eggers, Donoghue, Groff, Ward, Saunders, and Whitehead, among othersand finds that it always involves the faux utopian freedom and pseudo-messianic salvation of childhood.When contemporary novelists feature actual historical escape, pervasively from slavery or Nazism, it appears in their novels as escape envy or escape nostalgiTrade ReviewIf you haven’t yet encountered John Limon’s work, you have some exhilarating surprises ahead: it’s witty, keenly idiosyncratic, beautifully adroit at drawing unexpected connections, and spectacularly attuned to the evocative possibilities of both paradox and pathos. Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century is a savvy examination of crucial obsessions in some of our most ambitious and canonical contemporary fictions, helping us through the problem of conceiving not only what we’re escaping from but also what we’re escaping to. The result is an argument that will compel both the ornithologists and the birds: one that our Michael Chabons will find as illuminating as our Stanley Cavells. * Jim Shepard, author of The Book of Aron *Limon's bleakly funny and effortlessly learned study examines novels for which this, the world now before us, is ‘as good as it gets.’ That equivocal and confounding prospect, it turns out, haunts contemporary fiction in previously unimaginable ways. This is literary criticism at its very best. * Michael Szalay, Professor of English, Film, and Media, University of California, Irvine, USA *John Limon’s Escape, Escapism, Escapology will stand as a landmark study of the early twenty-first century Anglophone novel. Its elaboration of escapism offers a brilliantly original and suggestive framework for a widescale reconsideration of the force and interest of contemporary fiction. I can think of very few recent works of criticism that can match its interpretive verve and its contagious curiosity. It is thrilling to read such an intellectually forceful engagement with aesthetic culture of the present moment. * Deak Nabers, Associate Professor of English, Brown University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Escape, Escapism, Escapology 1. Notes from Neverland 2. I Flit, I Float, I Fleetly Flee, I Fly [on The Sound of Music] Part II: Family Likenesses 3. The Escapist [on Michael Chabon] 4. Mellon [on Junot Diaz] 5. Bath and Bathos [on Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer] 6. The Beauty! The Horror! [on Emma Donoghue] 7. Et in Nobis Arcadia [on Lauren Groff] 8. The Ethics of Immortality [on Colson Whitehead] 9. The Songs of Murdered Souls [On Jesmyn Ward and George Saunders] Part III: Foreign Correspondents 10. Choice and the Chosen [on David Grossman] 11. Categorical Denial [on Arundhati Roy] Part IV: Prequel 12. The Tunnel Out [on William H. Gass] Acknowledgments References Index

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Book SynopsisVeteran scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, and memoir to lament and scrutinize the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades. How are we to reckon with the decline of impartiality and sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; and the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences?In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on the great dismissal,' in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.Trade ReviewThis book establishes a new critical standard for memoir. The Great Dismissal demolishes efforts to expunge controversial books from our society simply because they induce people to think. Through an improvised mash-up of original poetry, trenchant cultural analysis, and touching memoir, Sussman's amazing book is an electroshock to the deadened brain of America. This kaleidoscopic survey of life during the Trump-COVID years from one of Derrida's most celebrated students is an extremely important and highly original work of social and political criticism. A must read for anyone who wants to make thinking great again! * Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston, Victoria, USA, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange *In The Great Dismissal, Henry Sussman crafts an extraordinary voice meticulously registering the existential vagaries of life in New York City during the twin plagues of COVID and Trump. This intimately personal, nonlinear chronicle foregrounds contemporary journalism that challenges the mendacity, hypocrisy, and subterfuge of American political culture. The Great Dismissal is a sustained meditation on intellectual redemptions that refuse to be dismissed by the Pharisees of disinformation. * Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science, Texas Tech University, USA *No one today writes – or thinks – quite like Henry Sussman. A rhizomatic memoir of the Trump era, The Great Dismissal reads as a critique of the present penned simultaneously from the future and past. Pulling from Piketty and Poe and conversations in the street with equal attentiveness, Sussman offers a vibrant, searing, subjective answer to the still critical questions: What is to be done, and Who is to blame? The passion of the prose itself models an alternative – an irrational but inexhaustible, perennial hope – to the post-apocalyptic global present he so skillfully scalpels apart. * Marijeta Bozovic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, USA *Table of Contents1. November 18, 2020. Postal. 2. October 6, 2020. Apocalypse red, apocalypse blue. 3. December 12, 2020. Confederacy of zombies. 4. October 18, 2019. Protests, curtailment of bus service, Queens. 5. June 7, 2020. Atlas of vanished places. 6. February 10, 2021. Requiem to disinterest. 7. January 27, 2020. New feudal lords. 8. Thanksgiving, 2021. Partisans of writing: Mayer with Derrida 9. April 1, 2018. Welcome to the Great Dismissal! 10. August 15, 2020. Co-lateral dommages. 11. December, 31, 2020. What on earth to do with the bodies? 12. August 30, 2018. Midterm enigmas for progressives. 13. December 15, 2021. Partisans of writing. Tobin Smith. 14. January 19, 2021. Politics of entertainment 15. May 24, 2020. Sikhs and other cabbies. 16. November 15, 2020. Electronic ticks and leaden bubbles. 17. June 13, 2019. Three deer in a development near Harrisburg, PA. 18. Labor Day, 2021. Partisans of writing. Shoshanah Zuboff. 19. March 15, 2022. Partisans of writing. Adam Serwer. 20. February 14, 2022. University of the street. 21. May 15, 2022. This Thing that dwells within us. 22. June 27, 2022. Dismissal day: The strange loop of identity politics. 23. January 23, 2023. I was there.

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Book SynopsisSocial Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing is the first book to bring rigorous literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse together to interrogate the ethics of governance and development in postcolonial Africa. It takes literature seriously as a context for philosophical reflection, vividly engaging the human agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of local Nigerians as political and social actors and shedding new light on the dynamics of human flourishing. Drawing on important secondary scholarship across several humanities disciplines, especially literature, philosophy, and the performing arts, Nimi Wariboko provides compelling and innovative analysis of the challenges and opportunities on governance and development in postcolonial Nigerian state and society. With a detailed introductory chapter and an authoritative analysis contained in six cohesive chapters, all anchored in political and social ethics and close readings of fascinating literary and artiTrade ReviewIn this highly original work, social ethicist Nimi Wariboko steps off Aristotle’s insight that literature can be an excellent tool for teaching ethics and developing moral imagination to interrogate the works of four Nigerian writers and one comedian, instructing how the intersection of philosophy and literature can teach invaluable lessons on imagining an ethical, pluralistic, and democratic society in Nigeria. Incisively brilliant and beautifully written, this is a must read. * Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong, Ellen Gurney Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, USA *In this influential book, Nimi Wariboko brilliantly and thoughtfully reflects on the ethics of governance and development in a post-colonial space. By employing secondary data and critical analysis, he adopts his diverse disciplinary perspectives and mastery to deeply interrogate ethical and governance issues that post-colonial states in Africa continue to grapple with. This book also deeply speaks to ethical, moral, and historical dilemmas facing governance and democracy, and it is a must read for anyone interested in social ethics and governance in post-colonial Africa. * Damaris Parsitau, Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Religion and Gender Studies, Egerton University, Kenya, and Country Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Hear Word—Literature Is Philosophy 1. Theoretical Hesitations: Ibadan Brown Roofs’ Rusty Revival of Desires 2. The Black Moon on the White Surface: A Philosophical Analysis of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass 3. Bad Governance and Postcoloniality: Literature as Cultural Criticism 4. From Executed God to Ozidi Saga: Ethos of Ijo Democratic Republicanism 5. Comedy as Dialectics: Laughing Nigeria to Human Flourishing 6. Literature as Ethics Bibliography

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Book SynopsisMargaret H. Freeman is Co-Director of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts, MA, USA. Professor Freeman's past publications include The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (2020).Trade ReviewFreeman's book is not just an engagingly learned re-introduction to Emily Dickinson but a provocation to consider how contemporary scholarship on embodied cognition may serve as a means of building a more complete understanding of Dickinson's poetic art. * Ryan Cull, Associate Professor of English, New Mexico State University, USA *Drawing on the insights of cognitive science, Margaret Freeman demonstrates that understanding a poem, even before any attempt at interpretation, is to cognitively experience it, allowing it to reveal itself by what it is saying and doing. Her subtle and meticulous analyses illustrate how those “animate organisms” work, and they are thus true eye-openers as well as an enormous gain for all lovers of Dickinson’s poems, academics and general readers alike. * Gudrun Grabher, Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria *Margaret Freeman's new book challenges our preconceptions not only about Emily Dickinson but also about the rapidly growing field of cognitive literary studies. She works scrupulously with all levels of Dickinson's poems, descrying impalpable nuances of poetic language while never losing sight of the final analysis and sense of indefinable but alluring artistic work. Freeman's book applies cognitive science findings and heuristics to literary studies and proffers a holistic view of the ways we read a poem, accompanied by step-by-step comments and striking readings. * Denis Akhapkin, Associate Professor of Languages and Literature, Smolny College, Russia *Table of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments 1. Demure as Dynamite: Dickinson and Cognition 2. Everything Counts: Reading the Manuscripts 3. The Manuscript Markings 4. Measuring Time in Meter and Rhythm 5. Affective Prosody 6. The Life of Words 7. Bringing a Poem to Life 8. Intimate Discourse 9. Grounded-Self Spaces 10. The Presence of Self 11. The Way We Map 12. Intentional Mapping 13. Conceiving a Universe 14. A Transformative Poetics 15. Dickinsonian Cognition Appendix References Index of First Lines Subject Index

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Book SynopsisCollection of sixteen German novellas from the 17th to the 20th century in the original language, showing the wide range of the genre, and fully glossed. This new collection, intended for the student and the interested general reader of German alike, includes both traditional examples, and those which fall outside the usual canon. The sixteen novellas in the volume have been carefully chosen on the bases of length, historical significance, popularity, and interest, and have been extensively glossed by the editor, who also provides an introduction to the history and theory of the genre. SiegfriedWeing is Professor of Modern Languages at the Virginia Military Institute.

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Book SynopsisVolume offering a guide to and reassessment of Thomas Mann's famous novel. Thomas Mann was the first writer since Goethe to attract a large international audience to stories written in German, bringing German fiction into the mainstream of European literature. His second major work, The Magic Mountain (1924), explores the heady intellectual culture of the chaotic and broken Germany that emerged from the First World War, and, along with the earlier Buddenbrooks, earned him a Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. Mann himself considered The Magic Mountain to be his greatest novel, and few in his own day doubted the preeminence of this modernist classic; however, many have argued that the age of literary modernism has passed. If this is so, how might we best understand Mann's masterpiece now? Topics covered in this volume, which aims to provide both a survey of and new research into important aspects of the work, include Mann's comic vision, his homosexuality, his fraught attitude toward Jews, the place of his novel in the landscape of postmodern life, the theme of solitude, music in the novel, and technology. Stephen D. Dowden is Professor of German at Brandeis University. Contributors: David Blumberg, Michael Brenner, Stephen Dowden, Edward Engelberg, Ulker Gökberk, Eugene Goodheart, Joseph P. Lawrence, Karla Schultz, Susan Sontag, Kenneth Weisinger. Stephen D. Dowden is Professor of German at Brandeis University.Trade ReviewBringing together a variety of approaches to the novel, this volume adds significantly to the literature available.... * CHOICE *Magisterial ruminations by prominent American academics who supply much intellectual and imaginative verve and insight. * FORUM FOR MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *This collection represents a stimulating companion indeed to the Magic Mountain. * MONATSHEFTE *[The work] succeeds by offering a range of both familiar and innovative approaches to Mann's text, surprising even the experienced reader of Mann's novel with sometimes unexpected vistas. * COLLOQUIA GERMANICA *Table of ContentsTransfiguration in Silence: Hans Castorp's Uncanny Awakening - Joseph Lawrence Mann's Ethical Style - Stephen D. Dowden Thomas Mann's Comic Spirit - Eugene Goodheart War as Mentor: Thomas Mann and Germanness - Ulker Gokberk From Muted Chords to Maddening Cacophony: Music in The Magic Mountain - David Blumberg Ambiguous Solitude: Hans Castorp's Sturm und Drang nach Osten - Edward Engelberg Mortal Illness on the Magic Mountain - Stephen Meredith - MD Beyond Naptha: Thomas Mann's Jews and German-Jewish Writing - Michael Brenner Technology as Desire: X-Ray Vision in The Magic Mountain - Karla L. Schultz Distant Oil Rigs and Other Erections - Kenneth Weisinger Pilgrimage - Susan Sontag

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Book SynopsisNew essays by leading scholars on the most perplexing of modern writers, Franz Kafka. No other 20th-century writer of German-language literature has been as fully accepted into the canon of world literature as Franz Kafka. The unsettlingly, enigmatically surreal world of Kafka's novels and stories continues to fascinate readers and critics of each new generation, who in turn continue to find new readings. One thing has become clear: although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. The challenge to criticshas been to present a strong point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research, a challenge that has been met by the contributors to this volume. Contributors: James Rolleston, Clayton Koelb, Walter H. Sokel, Judith Ryan, Russel A. Berman, Ritchie Robertson, Henry Sussman, Stanley Corngold, Bianca Theisen, Rolf J. Goebel, Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Sander L. Gilman, John Zilcosky, Mark Harman James Rolleston is Professor Emeritus of German at Duke University.Trade ReviewContains new material and insights by noted scholars whose work represents a full range of methodological and thematic diversity. * CHOICE *Appropriately reflects the ever-widening circles within which Kafka's texts can be viewed. Especially prominent ... are the discussions of texts as meta-narratives, their thematizations of problematic message transfer, and their meditations on unbridgeable misconception. * MODERN AUSTRIAN LITERATURE *This is a particularly successful collection,... several of whose individual studies will undoubtedly become touchstones of future Kafka research. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *This collection is necessary for any student of Kafka. The voices represented here, from the seasoned ... to the newly emerging, speak to the wide methodological range that typifies Kafka studies. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Kafka Begins - James Rolleston Critical Editions I: The 1994 Paperback Edition - James Rolleston Critical Editions II: Will the Real Franz Kafka Please Stand Up? - Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka - Walter H. Sokel Kafka Before Kafka: The Early Stories - Judith Ryan Tradition and Betrayal in "Das Urteil" - Russell A. Berman Kafka as Anti-Christian: "Das Urteil," "Die Verwandlung" and the Aphorisms - Ritchie Robertson Kafka's Aesthetics: A Primer: From the Fragments to the Novels - Henry Sussman Medial Allusions at the Ouset of Der Proceß; or, res in media - Stanley Corngold Kafka's Circus Turns: "Auf der Galerie" and "Erstes Leid" - Bianca Theisen Kafka and Postcolonial Critique: Der Verschollene, - Rolf J. Goebel Disjunctive Signs: Semiotics, Aesthetics and Failed Mediation in "In der Strafkolonie" - Richard T. Gray Hunting Kafka Out of Season: Enigmatics in the Short Fictions - Ruth V. Gross A Dream of Jewishness Denied: Kafka's Tumor and "Ein Landarzt" - Sander L. Gilman Surveying the Castle: Kafka's Colonial Visions - John Zilcosky Making Everything "A Little Uncanny": Kafka's Variants to Das Schloß and What They Can Tell Us About His Writing ProcessHis Writing Process - Mark Harman Kafka Imagines His Readers: The Rhetoric of "Josefine die Sängerin" and "Der Bau" -

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Book SynopsisFirst comprehensive look at how today's German literary fiction deals with questions of German victimhood. In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, expulsions of "ethnic" Germans, mass rapes of German women, and postwar internment and persecution. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's The Air War and Literature and Grass's Crabwalk are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance German victimhood and German perpetration. This book of essays is the first in English to examine closely the variety ofthese texts. An opening section on the 1950s -- a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration -- provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on "ordinary Germans," and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation. Contributors: Karina Berger, Elizabeth Boa, Stephen Brockmann, David Clarke, Mary Cosgrove, Rick Crownshaw, Helen Finch, Frank Finlay, Katharina Hall, Colette Lawson, Caroline Schaumann, Helmut Schmitz, Kathrin Schödel, and Stuart Taberner. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds. Karina Berger holds a PhD in German from the University of Leeds.Trade Review[A]n impressive testament to collaborative research. The . . . essays . . . all offer highly stimulating discussions of individual texts and topics, and can be read as self-contained pieces, but the book is far more than the sum of its parts: the coherence of its argument suggests not only masterly editing, but also the real benefits of scholars with related interests working together over an extended period. [This book] will be of interest to students, specialists, and general readers alike, and given the implications of the topic, deserves the widest possible audience. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Contributes to a growing body of research on the evolution of memory politics in post-unification Germany... Adds important inflections to current debates... Important, thought-provoking, and fittingly nuanced. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *The individual essays make a compelling and well-conceived contribution to an important and on-going discussion that in the ten years of its existence has gained in nuance and sophistication. * MONATSHEFTE *Provides a valuable overview about the range and complexity of literary accounts on 'German suffering. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Provocative yet accessible to a wide audience. * CHOICE *The volume adds support to the argument that the notion of 'German victims' did not begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Clearly structured, with a common theme that gives the work cohesion.... Will certainly stimulate academic debate and scholarship for years to come. * H-NET GERMAN *Has an impressive array of contributions. . . . [C]ertainly demonstrates the complexities of the current debates. * THIS YEAR'S WORK IN MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger W. G. Sebald and German Wartime Suffering - Stephen Brockmann The Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied Bombings - Colette Lawson Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye? - Karina Berger "In this prison of the guard room": Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939-1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates - Frank Finlay Family, Heritage, and German Wartime Suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm - Helmut Schmitz Lost Heimat in Generational Novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath - Elizabeth Boa "A Different Family Story": German Wartime Suffering in Women's Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun - Caroline Schaumann The Place of German Wartime Suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Family Text - David Clarke "Why only now?": The Representation of German Wartime Suffering as a "Memory Taboo" in Günter Grass's Novella Im Krebsgang - Katharina Hall Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator - Rick Crownshaw Narrating German Suffering in the Shadow of Holocaust Victimology: W. G. Sebald, Contemporary Trauma Theory, and Dieter Forte's Air Raids Epic - Mary Cosgrove Günter Grass's Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel:Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer? - Helen Finch Jackboots and Jeans: The Private and the Political in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders - Frank Finlay Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the "German Experience" of the Second World War? - Stuart Taberner "Secondary Suffering" and Victimhood: The "Other" of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's "Die Beschneidung" and Maxim Biller's "Harlem Holocaust" - Kathrin Schodel

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Book SynopsisNew, specially commissioned essays providing an in-depth scholarly introduction to the great thinker of the European Enlightenment. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is one of the great names of the classical age of German literature. One of the last universalists, he wrote on aesthetics, literary history and theory, historiography, anthropology, psychology,education, and theology; translated and adapted poetry from ancient Greek, English, Italian, even from Persian and Arabic; collected folk songs from around the world; and pioneered a better understanding of non-European cultures.A student of Kant's, he became Goethe's mentor in Strasbourg, and was a mastermind of the Sturm und Drang and a luminary of classical Weimar. But the wide range of Herder's interests and writings, along with his unorthodox ways of seeing things, seems to have prevented him being fully appreciated for any of them. His image has also been clouded by association with political ideologies, the proponents of which ignored the message of Humanität in histexts. So although Herder is acknowledged by scholars to be one of the great thinkers of European Enlightenment, there is no up-to-date, comprehensive introduction to his works in English, a lacuna this book fills with seventeennew, specially commissioned essays. Contributors: Hans Adler, Wulf Koepke, Steven Martinson, Marion Heinz and Heinrich Clairmont, John Zammito, Jürgen Trabant, Stefan Greif, Ulrich Gaier, Karl Menges, Christoph Bultmann, Martin Keßler, Arnd Bohm, Gerhard Sauder, Robert E. Norton, Harro Müller-Michaels, Günter Arnold, Kurt Kloocke, and Ernest A. Menze. Hans Adler is Halls-Bascom Professor of Modern Literature Studies at the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison. Wulf Koepke is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German, Texas A&M University and recipient of the Medal of the International J. G. Herder Society.Trade ReviewAll the essays represent the height of current research.. A work like this one does not exist in the German language! * ARBITRIUM *Until now, anyone looking for a comprehensive introduction to the life and thought of Herder had few options; with their co-edited [volume] however, Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke have identified a need for a general(ist) presentation of his ideas--and satisfied it. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Not since the appearance of Clark's monumental Herder: His Life and Thought has anyone produced a Herder study of this scope in English. The list of the 19 contributors of the 17 essays reads like a Who's Who of Herder scholarship.. Several features make this meticulously edited collection particularly attractive. The texts, including those translated, are in clear and readable English. All Herder quotations are given in German and English.. In sum, on all counts this is an impressive, important addition to the growing body of Herder scholarship. * CHOICE *The first English-language introduction that presents the work of Johann Gottfried Herder in all the richness of its many facets. . . . The thoroughly edited volume is doubtless well-placed to promote the knowledge of Herder's body of work in the Anglo-Saxon world. * GERMANISTIK *The essays offer not so much introductions as summative explorations of the current state of knowledge of Herder.. [A] well-conceived and well-executed companion. * H-NET GERMAN REVIEWS *Table of ContentsIntroduction - and Wulf Koepke Herder's Life and Works - Steven D. Martinson Herder's Epistemology - Heinrich Clairmont and Marion Heinz Herder and Historical Metanarrative: What's Philosophical about History? - John H. Zammito Herder's Concept of Humanität - Herder and Language - Juergen Trabant Herder's Aesthetics and :Poetics - Stefan Greif Myth, Mythology, New Mythology - Ulrich Gaier Particular Universals: Herder on National Literature, Popular Literature, and World Literature - Karl Menges The Germans and Their Future Literature - Wulf Koepke Herder's Biblical Studies and Theology I - Christoph Bultmann Herder's Biblical Studies and Theology II - Martin Kessler Herder and Politics - Arnd Bohm Herder's Poetic Works and Translations - Gerhard Sauder Herder's Style - Herder as Critical Contemporary - Robert E. Norton Herder in Office - Harro Mueller-Michaels The Reception and Influence of Herder's Works - Guenter Arnold and Kurt Kloocke and Ernest A. Menze

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Book SynopsisSixteen new, carefully focused essays on the prose works of one of the great writers of modernity. Thomas Mann is among the greatest of German prose writers, and was the first German novelist to reach a wide English-speaking readership since Goethe. Novels such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doktor Faustus attest to his mastery of subtle, distanced irony, while novellas such as Death in Venice reveal him at the height of his mastery of language. In addition to fresh insights about these best-known works of Mann, this volume treats less-often-discussed works such as Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and Felix Krull, as well as his political writings and essays. Mann himself was a paradox: his role as family-father was both refuge and façade; his love of Germany was matched by his contempt for its having embraced Hitler. While in exile during the Nazi period, he functioned as the prime representative of the "good" Germany in the fight against fascism, and he has often been remembered this way in English-speaking lands. But a new view of Mann is emerging half a century after his death: a view of him as one of the great writers of a modernity understood as extending into our 21st century. This volume provides sixteen essays by American and European specialists. They demonstrate the relevance of his writings for our time, making particular use of the biographical material that is now available. Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Manfred Dierks, Werner Frizen, Clayton Koelb, Helmut Koopmann, Wolfgang Lederer, Hannelore Mundt, Peter Pütz, Jens Rieckmann, Hans Joachim Sandberg, Egon Schwarz, and Hans Vaget. Herbert Lehnert is Research Professor, and Eva Wessell is Lecturer in Humanities, both at the University of California, Irvine.Trade ReviewLehnert and Wessell, themselves accomplished Mann scholars, assembled a stellar team of specialists from three countries for this collection...offers a wealth of insights. Essential. * CHOICE *[The book gives] reliable and readable accounts of Mann's works. It also introduces readers to current scholarship on those works. It thus accomplishes exactly what it is meant to do. It does so, moreover, in admirable breadth and depth. * MONATSHEFTE *This collection of essays forms part of a Camden House series in which 27 volumes have appeared since 1999 and which will eventually provide a panorama of the accepted peaks of German and Austrian literature from Hartmann von Aue to Thomas Bernhard and beyond. Almost without exception, the contributions provide good, general introductions to the texts under discussion and new insights for the specialist, or both. * MLR *Together with familiar facts well known to the reader of Thomas Mann one also finds quite original insights.... This work is of such richness that it would be useful translated into German to make it available to a larger public. * ETUDES GERMANIQUES *

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Book SynopsisNew essays on the most prominent German dramatist and short-story writer of the early 19th century. For over 150 years, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) has been one of the most widely read and performed German authors. His status in the literary canon is firmly established, but he has always been one of Germany's most contentiously discussed authors. Today's critical debate on his unique prose narratives and dramas is as heated as ever. Many critics regard Kleist as a lone presager of the aesthetics and philosophies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism. Yet there can be no question that he responds in his works and letters to the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates of his time. During the last thirty years, the scholarship on Kleist's work and life has departed from the existentialist wave of the 1950s and early 1960s and opened up new avenues for coming to terms with his unusual talent. The present volume brings together the most important and innovative of these newer scholarly approaches: the essays include critically informed, up-to-date interpretations of Kleist's most-discussed stories and dramas. Other contributions analyze Kleist's literary means and styles and their theoretical underpinnings. They include articles on Kleist's narrative and theatrical technique, poetic and aesthetic theory, philosophical and political thought, and insights from new biographical research. Contributors: Jeffrey L. Sammons,Jost Hermand, Anthony Stephens, Bianca Theisen, Hinrich C. Seeba, Bernhard Greiner, Helmut J. Schneider, Tim Mehigan, Susanne Zantop, Hilda M. Brown, and Seán Allan. Bernd Fischer is Professor of German and Head of theDepartment of German at Ohio State University.Trade ReviewThis volume... succeeds in providing insight into the rich complexity of Kleist's writings and ... bears testimony to the continued relevance of his oeuvre today. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *This volume is a stimulating study that contains much that will arouse the reader's interest and that promises to pave the way for further exciting probes into Kleist's remarkable contemporary oeuvre. * SEMINAR *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Heinrich von Kleist's Life and Work - Bernd Fischer Jupiterists and Alkemists: Amphitryon as an Example of How Kleist's Texts Read Interpreters - Jeffery L. Sammons Kleist's Penthesilea: Battleground of Gendered Discourses - Jost Hermand On Structures in Kleist - Anthony Stephens--til 7/03 Strange News: Kleist's Novellas - Bianca Theisen The Eye of the Beholder: Kleist's Visual Poetics of Knowledge - Hinrich C. Seeba The Performative Turn of the Beautiful: "Free Play" of Language and the "Unspeakable Person" - Bernhard Greiner The Facts of Life: Kleist's Challenge to Enlightenment Humanism (Lessing) - Helmut J. Schneider "Betwixt a false reason and none at all": Kleist, Hume, Kant, and the "Thing in Itself" - Tim Mehigan Changing Color: Kleist's "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo" and the Discourses of Miscegenation - Susanne Zantop-Deceased Ripe Moments and False Climaxes: Thematic and Dramatic Configurations of the Theme of Death in Kleist's Works - "Mein ist die Rache spricht der Herr": Violence and Revenge in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist - Sean Allan

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Book SynopsisA fresh and extensive look at the works of the great Austrian novelist in the context of the German and Austrian culture of his time. A panel of authors, critics, and academics convened by the Literaturhaus in Munich in 1999 voted Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities the most important German novel of the 20th century. Their collective judgment restson strong foundations: on the work's encyclopedic compass, embracing intellectual, social, political, and cultural concerns embodied in themes of striking originality; on its probing of key issues of Austrian and German life fromthe first four decades of the twentieth century; on the brilliance of its language, unsurpassed by any other 20th-century author writing in German. While this Companion gives The Man without Qualities the central focus it deserves, it also contributes to a deeper understanding of Musil's other significant works; in harnessing a team of established scholars from North America and Europe to the task of providing an assessment of Musil's work, it setsnew standards in scope and originality. The analyses are embedded in an appreciation of the intellectual contexts of Musil's writing, yielding fresh insights into Musil's artistic accomplishment and into his place in the Austrianand German cultural traditions of the 20th century. Contributors: Philip Payne, Klaus Amann, Galin Tihanov, Matthias Luserke-Jaqui, Silvia Bonacchi, Christian Rogowski, Peter Henninger, Walter Fanta, Karl Corino, GeneseGrill, Burton Pike, Rüdiger Görner Philip Payne is emeritus Professor of German Studies at Lancaster University, UK; Graham Bartram is retired as Senior Lecturer in German Studies at Lancaster University, UK; and Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK.Trade ReviewTaking advantage of new resources from the author's literary estate, this excellent book presents well-researched, contemporary interpretations.... This is the first reliable, balanced evaluation of his complete oeuvre. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Symbiosis of Robert Musil's Life and Works - Philip Payne Robert Musil: Literature and Politics - Klaus Amann Robert Musil's Diaries: Medium between Life and Literature - Philip Payne Robert Musil in the Garden of Conservatism - Galin Tihanov Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß: Adolescent Sexuality, the Authoritarian Mindset, and the Limits of Language - Matthias Luserke-Jaqui Musil's "Die Vollendung der Liebe": Experience Analyzed and Reconstituted - Sylvia Bonacchi "Shifts in Emphasis": Robert Musil's Die Schwärmer and Twentieth-Century Drama - Christian Rogowski Robert Musil's Novellas in the Collection Drei Frauen - Peter Henninger The Genesis of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften - Walter Fanta The Contribution of Biographical Research to the Understanding of Characters and Themes of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften - Karl Corino Figuring Thought in Culture: "Utopia" in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften from the Perspective of Kulturwissenschaft - Matthias Luserke-Jaqui The "Other" Musil: Robert Musil and Mysticism - Genese Grill Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Unfinished or without End? - Burton Pike The "Finale" of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Competing Editions and the "Telos" of the Narrative - Walter Fanta "Reception without Qualities": Musil's Impact on Austrian and German Writers after 1945 - Rudiger Gorner Select Bibliography Robert Musil's Life: A Chronology - Karl Corino Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisNew essays by leading scholars on major aspects of the most significant Austrian writer of the postwar generation. Since the death of Thomas Bernhard in 1989, the literary reputation of this complex and unique writer has risen to the point that he is now regarded as a major European figure. Bernhard emerged in the 1960s as one of Austria's major writers, challenging the popularity of such established writers as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass on the German literary scene. His idiosyncratic prose consists of a tragic-comic blend of themes such as suicide, madness, and isolation combined with highly satirical and histrionic invectives against culture, tradition, and society. As a skillful impresario of public scandals by means of verbal assaults upon Austrian elite culture, Bernhard also earned himself the epithet of Übertreibungskünstler (artist of exaggeration). In this art of cultural and political provocation Bernhard remains unmatched to the present day. This volume of essays provides contributions by well-known critics that examine the most salient aspects of Bernhard's work, offering insights into literary strategies and public themes that made Bernhard one of Europe's masters of modern prose and drama. Essays examine Bernhard's complex artistic sensibility, his impact on Austria's critical memory, his relation to the legacy of Austrian Jewish culture, his representative value as Austria's prime literary export, and his cosmopolitanism and its significance forthe rapidly changing multicultural landscape of Europe. Matthias Konzett is associate professor of German at Yale University. He is the author of The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek (Camden House, 2000). Click here to view the introduction (PDF file 97KB)Trade ReviewSucceeds marvelously in placing Bernhard within the context of postwar Austria. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *The present volume makes clear that the curtain has not yet fallen [on Bernhard] by a long way. * MONATSHEFTE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: National Iconoclasm: Thomas Bernhard and the Austrian Avant-garde - Matthias Konzett Perverted Attitudes of Mourning in the Wake of Thomas Bernhard's Death - Marlene Streeruwitz The Established Outsider: Thomas Bernhard - Dagmar C. G. Lorenz A Testament Betrayed: Bernhard and His Legacy - Stephen D. Dowden Homeland, Death, and Otherness in Thomas Bernhard's Early Lyrical Works - Paola Bozzi The Broken Window Handle: Thomas Bernhard's Notion of Weltbezug - Ruediger Goerner Thomas Bernhard's Poetics of Comedy - Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler Fragments of a Deluge: The Theater of Thomas Bernhard's Prose - Mark M. Anderson The Stranger Inside the Word: From Thomas Bernhard's Plays to the Anatomical Theater of Elfriede Jelinek - Gitta Honegger Costume Drama: Performance and Identity in Bernhard's Works - Andrew J. Webber Language Speaks: Anglo-Bernhard: Thomas Bernhard in Translation - Gitta Honegger Ungleichzeitigkeiten: Class Relationships in Bernhard's Fiction - Jonathan Long Thomas Bernhard's Der Untergeher: Newtonian Realities and Deterministic Chaos - Willy Riemer My Latest Encounter with Bernhard - Marlene Streeruwitz

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Book SynopsisA much-needed look at the fiction that was actually read by masses of Germans in the late nineteenth century, and the conditions of its publication and reception. The late nineteenth century was a crucial period for the development of German fiction. Political unification and industrialization were accompanied by the rise of a mass market for German literature, and with it the beginnings ofthe German bestseller.Offering escape, romance, or adventure, as well as insights into the modern world, nineteenth-century bestsellers often captured the imagination of readers well into the twentieth century and beyond. However, many have been neglected by scholars. This volume offers new readings of literary realism by focusing not on the accepted intellectual canon but on commercially successful fiction in its material and social contexts. It investigates bestsellers from writers such as Freytag, Dahn, Jensen, Raabe, Viebig, Stifter, Auerbach, Storm, Möllhausen, Marlitt, Suttner, and Thomas Mann. The contributions examine the aesthetic strategies that made the works sucha success, and writers' attempts to appeal simultaneously on different levels to different readers. Bestselling writers often sought to accommodate the expectations of publishers and the marketplace, while preserving some sense ofartistic integrity. This volume sheds light on the important effect of the mass market on the writing not just of popular works, but of German prose fiction on all levels. Contributors: Christiane Arndt, Caroline Bland, Elizabeth Boa, Anita Bunyan, Katrin Kohl, Todd Kontje, Peter C. Pfeiffer, Nicholas Saul, Benedict Schofield, Ernest Schonfield, Martin Swales, Charlotte Woodford. Charlotte Woodford is Lecturer in German and Directorof Studies in Modern Languages at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Benedict Schofield is Senior Lecturer in German and Head of the Department of German at King's College London.Trade Review[T]akes a fresh and highly productive look at German best-selling novels and novellas written between the 1840s and the early 1900s. It combines sociohistorical enquiry into the history of literary writing, publishing, and reading with a particular focus on 'the fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market.' . . . The twelve chapters . . . written by established Germanists as well as younger researchers, are well researched and thoughtful almost throughout. Many are highly successful in combining socio-historical enquiry with in-depth literary analysis. --Dirk Göttsche, * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *[F]ascinating . . . . In her excellent introduction, Charlotte Woodford draws attention to the production and distribution of literature in the nineteenth century as well as to the rapid growth of subscription libraries. The serialisation of longer fiction was also an important factor in bringing literature to a wider and broader-based audience. All these factors are taken up . . . by Benedict Schofield, [Woodford's] co-editor, and the other ten contributors to the volume. * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES *Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *Handsomely produced and expertly edited . . . . The essays are often fascinating and always informative. The best of them make their arguments against the forgetting of their once-bestselling authors exciting. They share a passion for getting to the bottom of why, in or outside Germany, we know so little about books that were, in the main, not just flashes in the pan, as they often endured for up to a century. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT [P]resents a fresh look at late-nineteenth-century realist ?ction by examining the 'fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market' (1). [D]emonstrates an exceptional breadth . . . . [T]his impressive collection will surely inject new energy into nineteenth-century scholarship. . . . [I]ts unique focus on poetics provides a welcome complement to recent scholarship such as Publishing Culture and the 'Reading Nation' (edited by Lynne Tatlock, [Camden House], 2010). * MONATSHEFTE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: German Fiction and the Marketplace in the Nineteenth Century - Charlotte Woodford Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Bestseller - Benedict Schofield Felix Dahn's Ein Kampf um Rom: Historical Fiction as Melodrama - Todd Kontje Wilhelm Jensen and Wilhelm Raabe: Literary Value, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Competition in the Marketplace - Nicholas Saul Clara Viebig: Using the Genres of Heimatkunst und Großstadtroman to Create Bestselling Novels - Caroline Bland Buddenbrooks as Bestseller - Ernest Schonfield Homeliness and Otherness: Reflections on Stifter's Bergkristall - Martin Swales Berthold Auerbach's Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten: Political and Religious Contexts of a Nineteenth-Century Bestseller - Anita Bunyan Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter: Schauerralismus or Gothic Realism in the Family Periodical - Christiane Arndt Selling the Experience of the New World: Balduin Möllhausen's Novellistic Imagination of America - Peter Pfeiffer E. Marlitt's Bestselling Poetics - Katrin Kohl Bertha von Suttner's Die Waffen nieder! and Gabriele Reuter's Aus guter Familie: Sentimentality and Social Criticism - Charlotte Woodford Taking Sex to Market: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen: Von einerToten and Josefine Mutzenbacher, Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne, von ihr selbst erzählt - Elizabeth Boa Works Cited Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisNew essays on topics spanning the Age of Goethe, with a special section of fresh views of Goethe and Idealism. The Goethe Yearbook is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America, publishing original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcomingcontributions from scholars around the world. Volume 18 features a special section on Goethe and Idealism, edited by Elizabeth Millán and John H. Smith and including essays on Goethe and Spinoza; Goethe's notions of intuition and intuitive judgment; Novalis, Goethe, and Romantic science; Goethe and Humboldt's presentation of nature; Hegel's Faust; Goethe contra Hegel on the end of art; Goethean morphology and Hegelian science; and Goethe andphilosophies of religion. There are also essays on fraternity in Goethe, Margarete-Ariadne as Faust's labyrinth, Schiller's Geisterseher, and Martin Walser's Goethe novel Ein liebender Mann, and a review essay on recent books on money and materiality in German culture heads the book review section. Contributors: Frederick Amrine, Brady Bowen, Jeffrey Champlin, Adrian Del Caro, Stefani Engelstein, Luke Fischer, Gail Hart, Gunnar Hindrichs, Jens Kruse, Horst Lange, Elizabeth Millán, Dalia Nassar, John H. Smith. Daniel Purdy is Associate Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Book review editor Catriona MacLeod is Associate Professorof German at the University of Pennsylvania.Table of ContentsIntroduction-Goethe and Idealism: Points of Intersection Goethe and Spinoza: A Reconsideration Goethean Intuitions Goethe's Notion of an Intuitive Power of Judgment "Idealism is nothing but genuine empiricism":Novalis, Goethe, and the Ideal of Romantic Science The Quest for the Seeds of Eternal Growth: Goethe and Humboldt's Presentation of Nature Hegel's Faust Goethe contra Hegel: The Question of the End of Art Goethean Morphology, Hegelian Science: Affinities and Transformations Civic Attachments & Sibling Attractions: The Shadows of Fraternity Margarete-Ariadne: Faust's Labyrinth Save the Prinz: Schiller's Geisterseher and the Lure of Entertainment Walsers Trilogie der Leidenschaft: Eine Analyse seinesGoethe-Romans Ein liebender Mann im Kontext der Tradition der Ulrike-Romane Review Essay: What's New in the New Economic Criticism Book Reviews

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Book SynopsisBrecht's activities in the GDR, the regime's marginalizing response and posthumous appropriation of his legacy, and creative responses in the GDR and after. The avant-garde writer and director Bertolt Brecht left the West for good in 1949, returning to East Berlin and founding the Berliner Ensemble. While he quickly became identified internationally as the cultural figurehead of the young socialist state, his relationship with the authorities was always complex, and he was increasingly marginalized by restrictive and authoritarian structures of power. It was only after his death that the regime sought to elevate him as a socialist classic - a shift that entailed the selective appropriation of his legacy and the development of authorized modes of interpretation and performance. Poets, theorists, dramatists, and directors soon reacted against what they saw as the stagnation of Brecht's critical impetus: they began to subject his work to his own treatment, using his texts as a source of material and taking his methods to more radical conclusions. EGYB 5 explores the multiple, contradictory impulses behind these broad paradigm shifts and behind Brecht's activities in the GDR. It investigates the tensions engendered by his co-option as a socialist classic, and the range of creative responses his works have inspired, both in the GDR itself and in reaction to its demise. Contributors: David Barnett, Laura Bradley, Joy Calico, Paula Hanssen, Patrick Harkin, Loren Kruger, Karen Leeder, Moray McGowan, Stephen Parker, David Robb, Erdmut Wizisla. Laura Bradley is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Edinburgh. Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature and a Fellow of New College, University of Oxford.Trade ReviewBradley and Leeder have done an admirable job of organizing the essays into a comprehensive and cohesive overview of Brecht's life and legacy in East Germany. . . . [T]his work makes a compelling case for the lasting importance of Brecht's contributions to German culture, not only during the prime of his career, but in its sometimes ambiguous twilight as well. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *A valuable addition to an excellent series, this volume focuses on Brecht's relationship with the GDR: his life and work there from May 1949 when he moved to East Berlin, the GDR's controversial management of his legacy after his death in 1956, and the creative responses to his work before and after the demise of the country. Through careful structuring and judicious cross-referencing, the volume's eleven essays achieve a degree of coherence not always found in similar collaborative enterprises. . . . [The final two] essays assert . . . the unmistakable relevance of Brecht's work to a critical understanding of the destructive impact of neo-liberalism and globalization on present-day realities. -- Ian Wallace, MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW[G]uides readers through a complex world . . . . I emerged from [reading] the book energized and excited, with several resolutions and new insights. . . . [The volume] not only fill[s] a gap in the discussion of Brecht after 1949, but also . . . propels Brecht's critiques into an unknown future. . . . This book offers one of [the] keys to a vast collection of Brecht scholarship. * BRECHT YEARBOOK *[B]oth useful and usable. Readers unfamiliar with Brecht's 'Wirkung' in the GDR can use it as a starting point for further inquiry, but it also points out directions in Brecht research that will offer new perspectives for experts in fields such as Brecht's theatrical and musical legacy or his late poetry. . . . [L]ay[s] to rest any claims that Brecht's influence on German culture is on the decline. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Table of ContentsIntroduction Undogmatic Marxism: Brecht Rehearses at the Berliner Ensemble Lateness and Late Style in Brecht's Last Poetry A Life's Work Curtailed? The Ailing Brecht's Struggle with the SED Leadership over GDR Cultural Policy Brecht and 17 June 1953: A Reassessment Private or Public? The Bertolt Brecht Archive as an Object of Desire Remembering Brecht: Anniversaries at the Berliner Ensemble Brecht's Dependable Disciple in the GDR: Elisabeth Hauptmann Musical Threnodies for Brecht The Legacy of Brecht in East German Political Song Fatzer's Footprints: Brecht's Fatzer and the GDR Theater Reviving Saint Joan of the Stockyards: Speculation and Solidarity in the Era of Capitalism Resurgent

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Book SynopsisA study of the "patchwork imaginary" that is postwall Berlin fiction and its significance for the new Germany. The wall was still coming down when critics began to call for the great Berlin novel that could explain what was happening to Germany and the Germans. Such a novel never appeared. Instead, writers have created a patchwork imaginary -- in the form of about 300 works of fiction set in Berlin -- of a city and a nation whose identity collapsed virtually overnight. Contributors to this literary collage include established writers like Peter Schneider and Christa Wolf, young authors like Tanja Dückers and Ingo Schramm, German-Turkish authors Zafer Senocak and Yadé Kara, and the Austrians Kathrin Röggla and Marlene Streeruwitz. The non-arrival of the great Berlin novel marks the reorientation in German culture and literature that is the focus of this study: the experience of unification was too diverse, too postmodern, too influenced by global developments to be captured by one novel. Berlin literature of the postunification decade is marked by ambiguity: change is linked to questions of historical continuity; postmodern simulation finds its counterpart in a quest for authenticity; and the assimilation of Germanness into European and global contexts is both liberation and loss. This book pursues a nuanced understanding of the search for new ways to tell the story of Germany's past and of its importance for the formation of a new German identity. Katharina Gerstenberger is Professor of German at the University of Cincinnati.Trade ReviewImpressive, both in the scope of works analysed and in the variety of approaches employed.... Writing the New Berlin is both crucial and timely. * MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *This is a useful volume which will be widely read. Gerstenberger writes engagingly and with ease, and she knows her material well. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *For anyone with an interest in contemporary German literature, or in Berlin, ... Gerstenberger's study is a necessary starting point. * MONATSHEFTE *An extremely valuable contribution to scholarship about most recent German literature and Germans after unification. * FOCUS ON GERMAN STUDIES *A true gem for students and scholars who venture beyond the introduction to follow Gerstenberger's detailed analyses and thoughtful insights. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[Gerstenberger] indicates that the genuine fascination and value of the literature of the two decades after the Wende lies in the richness of its multi-faceted reflections of an extraordinary moment in the life of this remarkable city. * DEUTSCH: LEHREN UND LERNEN *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Newness and Its Discontents: Berlin Literature in the 1990s and Beyond Erotic Sites: Sexual Topographies after the Wall Bodies and Borders: The Monsters of Berlin Multicultural Germans and Jews of Many Cultures:Imagining "Jewish Berlin" Goodbye to East Berlin Looking for Perspectives: The Construction at Potsdamer Platz Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe first scholarly book treating the huge amount of recent and contemporary fiction set in the Age of Goethe and employing Goethe and other figures of the period as characters. The Age of Goethe is widely viewed as the apogee of German culture. Its writers and thinkers, especially Goethe, have been exalted as role models for life and art, particularly after 1945. Yet in the 1970s, a new generation of German writers in both East and West rebelled against the postwar hagiography, taking up a tradition of imaginatively engaging with the giants of the period, casting them in major roles in their works in order to critique the nation's past and its present, a tradition that has been carried on by more contemporary writers. This is the first book-length study devoted to modern German "author-as-character" fiction set in the Age of Goethe. It shows for thefirst time in a sustained manner the powerful hold the Goethezeit continues to exercise on the imagination of many of Germany's leading writers. This inner-German dialogue across the ages provides an important corrective to the dominant critical view that contemporary German-language literature is composed primarily under the sign of both globalization and the influence of mass American culture. The book will be of interest to both scholars of theGoethezeit and of contemporary German literature and culture. John D. Pizer is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University.Trade ReviewIt is not often that a study provides us with such a winning examination of the underpinnings of authorial thinking and of literary movements that so directly connect two centuries as distantly separated as the eighteenth and twentieth . . . . Yet John Pizer has managed to elucidate something new about the Goethezeit and its direct relation to the literature of our time. * GOETHE YEARBOOK *Absorbing. . . . Well researched, learned, and lively, this informative volume will help readers discern directions undertaken by contemporary writers who redefine some of Germany's cultural icons. [. . .] Recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction Staging Violence and Transcendence, Embracing Feminism:The Instantiation of Kleist and German Romanticism Hölderlins East and West Between Feminism and National Identity:The Historical Novels of Renate Feyl Goethe Contra and Pro Savaging and Salvaging the German Enlightenment Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisInvestigates the function and meaning of sadness in German, Austrian, and Swiss literature and culture from the 18th century to the present. Established, commissioned, and edited by the Department of German at the University of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh German Yearbook is the only peer-reviewed German Studies publication that each year invites scholarly contributions on a single topic of current challenge to the field. Focusing on "Sadness and Melancholy in German-language Literature and Culture," volume 6 investigates the often subversive function and meaning of sadness and melancholy inGerman-language literature and culture from the seventeenth century to the present where, arguably, it has fallen from the heights of melancholy genius and artistic creativity of earlier epochs to become the embarrassing other ofa Western civilization that prizes happiness as the mark of successful modern living. Interrogating the distinction between sadness as an anthropological constant and melancholy as a shifting cultural discourse, the contributionsexplore how different authors use established literary and cultural topoi from melancholy discourses to comment on topics as diverse as war, religion, gender inequality, and modernity. As well as essays on canonical figures including Goethe and Thomas Mann, the volume features studies of sadness in lesser-known writers such as Betty Paoli and Julia Schoch. Contributors: Per Brandt, Peter Damrau, Kristian Donko, Svenja Frank, Jens Hobus, StephenJoy, Johannes D. Kaminski, Franziska Meyer, Richard Millington, Karin S. Wozonig. Mary Cosgrove is Reader in German at the University of Edinburgh. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University ofLondon.Trade ReviewThis rich collection makes a strong case for the continuing relevance of literature as a space that allows us to project and explore emotional states, but also as a source of Identifizierungsangebote for our own (sad?) lives. Readers of a less than sanguine disposition may want to approach it with caution, and remain mindful of Goethe's exhortation: 'Gedenke zu leben! * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Sadness and Melancholy in German-Language Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present: An Overview - Mary Cosgrove Tears That Make the Heart Shine? "Godly Sadness" in Pietism - Peter Damrau Produktive Negativität: Traurigkeit als Möglichkeitssinn um 1800 - Johannes Kaminski Die Schwester Lenaus? Betty Paoli und der Weltschmerz - Karin S Wozonig "Immer wieder kehrst du, Melancholie": Plotting Georg Trakl's Poetic Sadness - Richard Millington Die Lust am Unendlichen: Melancholie und Ironie bei Robert Walser - Per Brandt and Jens Hobus Melancholy Echo and the Case of Serenus Zeitblom - Steve Joy Melancholy in Wilhelm Genazino's Novels and Its Construction as Other - Svenja Frank The Past is Another Country and the Country Is Another Past: Sadness in East German Texts by Jakob Hein and Julia Schoch - Franziska Meyer

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Book SynopsisFirst comprehensive look at how today's German literary fiction deals with questions of German victimhood. In recent years it has become much more accepted in Germany to consider aspects of the Second World War in which Germans were not perpetrators, but victims: the Allied bombing campaign, expulsions of "ethnic" Germans, mass rapes of German women, and postwar internment and persecution. An explosion of literary fiction on these topics has accompanied this trend. Sebald's The Air War and Literature and Grass's Crabwalk are key texts, but there are many others; the great majority seek not to revise German responsibility for the Holocaust but to balance German victimhood and German perpetration. This book of essays is the first in English to examine closely the variety ofthese texts. An opening section on the 1950s -- a decade of intense literary engagement with German victimhood before the focus shifted to German perpetration -- provides context, drawing parallels but also noting differences between the immediate postwar period and today. The second section focuses on key texts written since the mid-1990s shifts in perspectives on the Nazi past, on perpetration and victimhood, on "ordinary Germans," and on the balance between historical empathy and condemnation. Contributors: Karina Berger, Elizabeth Boa, Stephen Brockmann, David Clarke, Mary Cosgrove, Rick Crownshaw, Helen Finch, Frank Finlay, Katharina Hall, Colette Lawson, Caroline Schaumann, Helmut Schmitz, Kathrin Schödel, and Stuart Taberner. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds. Karina Berger holds a PhD in German from the University of Leeds.Trade Review[A]n impressive testament to collaborative research. The . . . essays . . . all offer highly stimulating discussions of individual texts and topics, and can be read as self-contained pieces, but the book is far more than the sum of its parts: the coherence of its argument suggests not only masterly editing, but also the real benefits of scholars with related interests working together over an extended period. [This book] will be of interest to students, specialists, and general readers alike, and given the implications of the topic, deserves the widest possible audience. * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *Contributes to a growing body of research on the evolution of memory politics in post-unification Germany... Adds important inflections to current debates... Important, thought-provoking, and fittingly nuanced. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *The individual essays make a compelling and well-conceived contribution to an important and on-going discussion that in the ten years of its existence has gained in nuance and sophistication. * MONATSHEFTE *Provides a valuable overview about the range and complexity of literary accounts on 'German suffering. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *Provocative yet accessible to a wide audience. * CHOICE *The volume adds support to the argument that the notion of 'German victims' did not begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *Clearly structured, with a common theme that gives the work cohesion.... Will certainly stimulate academic debate and scholarship for years to come. * H-NET GERMAN *Has an impressive array of contributions. . . . [C]ertainly demonstrates the complexities of the current debates. * THIS YEAR'S WORK IN MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger W. G. Sebald and German Wartime Suffering - Stephen Brockmann The Natural History of Destruction: W. G. Sebald, Gert Ledig, and the Allied Bombings - Colette Lawson Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye? - Karina Berger "In this prison of the guard room": Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939-1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates - Frank Finlay Family, Heritage, and German Wartime Suffering in Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Stephan Wackwitz, Thomas Medicus, Dagmar Leupold, and Uwe Timm - Helmut Schmitz Lost Heimat in Generational Novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, and Angelika Overath - Elizabeth Boa "A Different Family Story": German Wartime Suffering in Women's Writing by Wibke Bruhns, Ute Scheub, and Christina von Braun - Caroline Schaumann The Place of German Wartime Suffering in Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Family Texts - David Clarke "Why only now?": The Representation of German Wartime Suffering as a "Memory Taboo" in Günter Grass's Novella Im Krebsgang - Katharina Hall Rereading Der Vorleser, Remembering the Perpetrator - Rick Crownshaw Narrating German Suffering in the Shadow of Holocaust Victimology: W. G. Sebald, Contemporary Trauma Theory, and Dieter Forte's Air Raids Epic - Mary Cosgrove Günter Grass's Account of German Wartime Suffering in Beim Häuten der Zwiebel: Mind in Mourning or Boy Adventurer? - Helen Finch Jackboots and Jeans: The Private and the Political in Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders - Frank Finlay Memory-Work in Recent German Novels: What (if Any) Limits Remain on Empathy with the "German Experience" of the Second World War? - Stuart Taberner "Secondary Suffering" and Victimhood: The "Other" of German Identity in Bernhard Schlink's "Die Beschneidung" and Maxim Biller's "Harlem Holocaust" - Kathrin Schodel

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Book SynopsisThe first sustained interrogation of travel in Sebald's literary and essayistic work, employing multivalent and new critical perspectives. W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) is the most prominent and perhaps the most enigmatic German-language writer of recent decades. His books have had a more profound impact outside the German-speaking world than those of any other. His innovative approach to writing brings to the fore concerns that are central to contemporary culture: the relationship between memory, history, and trauma; the experience of exile and our relation to place; and the role of literature (and photography) in the remembrance of the past. This collection of essays places travel at the center of Sebald's poetics and shows how his appropriation of travel in its myriad historical and cultural forms -- tourism, the pilgrimage, the walking vacation, travel as escape -- works to craft intertextual narratives in which the pursuit of individual life stories is mapped onto a wider European cultural history of loss and destruction. Following these cues,the contributors wander the various modalities of travel in Sebald's writing in order to discover how walking, flying, sojourning, and other kinds of peregrination inform the relationship between writing, reading, memory, and place in Sebald's work. At the same time, the essays uncover in innovative ways the affinities between Sebald and literary travelers like Bruce Chatwin, Franz Kafka, Adalbert Stifter, Christoph Ransmayr, and Joseph Conrad. Contributors: Christian Moser, J. J. Long, Carolin Duttlinger, Martin Klebes, Alan Itkin, James Martin, Brad Prager, Neil Christian Pages, Margaret Bruzelius, Barbara Hui, Dora Osborne, Peter Arnds. Markus Zisselsbergeris Assistant Professor of German at the University of Miami, Florida.Trade ReviewThe collection [contains] 12 essays of remarkable quality . . . . [It] indeed journeys into 'undiscover'd country,' pursues innovative interpretive paths, and opens intriguing new vistas . . . . [T]he work is destined to become a milestone of Sebald scholarship. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[T]his is a distinguished addition to Sebald criticism, and essential reading for scholars, students and general readers with any interest in Sebald. * JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN STUDIES *[W]ill take its place on the map of Sebald studies . . . . assembling . . . a wide range of (mostly) excellent essays. . . . The real value of this collection lies in the individual essays connected by the master trope of travel. . . . The strongest chapters make a genuine contribution to Sebald studies and will guarantee the book a lengthy shelf life . . . . * ENGLISH STUDIES IN CANADA *Those new to Sebald would do well to study Zisselsberger's fine introduction, which sums up issues in Sebald scholarship and places the book in the context of the vast literature on Sebald. . . . Though it treats themes familiar to Sebald scholarship, . . . the book does not evoke the feeling of repetitiveness that so many contributions to the Sebald literature do. . . . Illustrations appear throughout. . . . This book is destined to become a standard. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *A significant contribution to scholarship (particularly since it includes a reprint of Sebald's early, not previously widely available essay, 'Die Kunst des Fliegens'). If the exact calibration of the relationship in Sebald's work between the two terms 'travel' and 'literature' remains unresolved, the volume is a fitting tribute to this most elusive of authors. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Fluchtträume/Traumfluchten; Journeys to the Undiscover'd Country Die Kunst des Fliegens by W. G. Sebald Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk W. G. Sebald: The Anti-Tourist "A Wrong Turn of the Wheel": Sebald's Journeys of (In)Attention If You Come to a Spa: Displacing the Cure in Schwindel. Gefühle. and Austerlitz Campi Deserti: Polar Landscapes and the Limits of Knowledge in Sebald and Ransmayr "Eine Art Eingang zur Unterwelt": Katabasis in Austerlitz Convergence Insufficiency: On Seeing Passages between W. G. Sebald and the "Travel Writer" Bruce Chatwin Tripping: On Sebald's "Stifter" Adventure, Imprisonment, and Melancholy: Heart of Darkness and Die Ringe des Saturn Mapping Historical Networks in Die Ringe des Saturn Topographical Anxiety and Dysfunctional Systems: Die Ausgewanderten and Freud's Little Hans While the Hidden Horrors of History are Briefly Illuminated: The Poetics of Wandering in Austerlitz and Die Ringe des Saturn Works Cired Notes on the Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisHow are voices like places? They move through us as we move through them. Celebrated poet David Mason explores surprising connections in geography and time, considering writers who traveled, who emigrated or were exiled, and who often shaped the literature of their homelands. He writes of seasoned travelers (Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Herodotus himself), and writers as far flung as Omar Khayyam, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, James Joyce, and Les Murray. In the end, he turns to his own native region, the American West, with Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, Robinson Jeffers, Belle Turnbull, and Thomas McGrath. These essays are about familiarity and estrangement, the pleasure and knowledge readers can gain by engaging with writers lives, their travels, their trials, and the homes they make for themselves

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Book SynopsisHow can traditions be subversive? The kinship between African traditions and novels has been under debate for the better part of a century, but the conversation has stagnated because of a slowness to question the terms on which it is based: orality vs. writing, tradition vs. modernity, epic vs. novel. These rigid binaries were, in fact, invented by colonialism and cemented by postcolonial identity politics. Thanks to this entrenched paradigm, far too much ink has been poured into the so-called Great Divide between oral and writing societies, and to the long-lamented decline of the ways of old.Given advances in social science and humanities research - studies in folklore, performance, invented traditions, colonial and postcolonial ethnography, history, and pop culture - the moment is right to rewrite this calcified literary history. This book is not another story of subverted traditions, but of subversive ones.West African epics like Sunjata, Samori, and Lat-Dior offer a space from which to think about, and criticize, the issues of today, just as novels in European languages do.Through readings of documented performances and major writers like Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampâté Bâ of Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Aminata Sow Fall and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, this book conducts an entirely new analysis of West African oral epic and its relevance to contemporary world literature.

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Book SynopsisHow do we explain our newfound cultural investment in empathy and social justice? For decades, Joseph Campbell had defined our cultural aspirations in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, emphasising the value of seeking glory and earning immortality. His work became the playbook for Hollywood, with its many male-centric quest narratives. Unsatisfied with Campbell’s once-canonical work, Maria Tatar explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and deprived of a pen, have flown beneath the radar even as they have been bent on social missions. Using the domestic arts and storytelling skills, they have displayed audacity, curiosity and care as they struggled to survive and change the reigning culture. Animating figures from Ovid’s Philomela, her tongue severed yet still weaving a tale about sexual assault, to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, a high-tech wizard seeking justice for victims of a serial killer, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present.Trade Review"Our ur-narratives, Tatar shows, return again and again to the abuse and silencing of women, and the heroines she selects in myths, fairy tales, novels, television series, news stories and films use storytelling to ‘rescue, restore, or fix things’. Starting with Philomela, who was raped and had her tongue cut out, Tatar reminds us that contemporary Philomelas are everywhere, only today we cut out their tongues with confidentiality agreements and by creating situations, as Ronan Farrow said of Harvey Weinstein, in which a woman’s silence will benefit her more than speaking out ever could." -- Frances Wilson - Literary Review

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Book SynopsisThe first study to utilize the Klagenfurt Edition of Musil's Nachlass offers a close reading of textual variations, emphasizing Musil's commitment to the artist's role in re-creating the world. Robert Musil, known to be a scientific and philosophical thinker, was committed to aesthetics as a process of experimental creation of an ever-shifting reality. Musil wanted, above all, to be a creative writer, and he obsessively engaged in almost endless deferral via variations and metaphoric possibilities in his novel project, The Man without Qualities. This lifelong process of writing is embodied in the unfinished novel by a recurring metaphor of self-generating de-centered circle worlds. The present study analyzes this structure with reference to Musil's concepts of the utopia of the Other Condition, Living and Dead Words, Specific and Non-Specific Emotions, Word Magic, and the Still Life. In contrast to most recent studies of Musil, it concludes that the extratemporal metaphoric experience of the Other Condition does not fail, but rather constitutes the formal and ethical core of Musil's novel. The first study to utilize the Klagenfurter Ausgabe (Klagenfurt edition) of Musil's literary remains (a searchable annotated text), The World as Metaphor offers a close reading of variations and text genesis, shedding light not only on Musil's novel, but also on larger questions about the modernist artist's role and responsibility in consciously re-creating the world.Trade ReviewGrill's meticulously researched study offers a persuasive and original interpretation of [Musil's] novel. . . . [T]his book is highly recommended for a deeper understanding of Musil's brilliant and still relevant modernist work. * JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN STUDIES *Grill's book is a careful meditation on the poetics of metaphor that she finds organizing Musil's novel. Grill has mined the Nachlaß to good effect, making available important material and new considerations of the novel. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *[A] worthy contribution to international Musil research. Grill obtains with it the rare status of a researcher who at one and the same time explains a thesis and carries it out in her own writing. For her painstaking work in the archive the study earns the particular praise and interest of those who want to concern themselves more deeply with the canonical works of modernism such as The Man without Qualities. * MUSIL-FORUM *[P]rovides an invaluable structure - the best I've encountered - for assessing the later sections and unfinished draft material of The Man Without Qualities. . . . Grill's major achievement is in bringing together the disparate, unpublished material of Musil's last years into a structure that clarifies, at least somewhat, Musil's ambitions. . . . For illuminating the join between the earlier and latter sections of [Musil's novel] in a way that gives real shape to the whole, Grill's book is tremendous. * DAVID AUERBACH, WAGGISH.ORG *[I]nspired and textually knowledgeable . . . . [A] spirited and enthusiastic defence of the creative literary act as a kind of utopian 'révolution permanente' . . . forever avoiding closure . . . . The reader is led through a rich textual landscape, from quotation to quotation (including material from the Klagenfurt electronic edition . . .), but the overall impression thus generated is of a self-referential and secular artistic universe that is loaded with theological expectations - something that would surely have made Musil smile. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Failure to Reconcile as Modernist Success Circles Repeatability and Crime Word Magic Still Life: (Not) Doing What Isn't Done Conclusion

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Book SynopsisStudies of Eastern European literature have largely confined themselves to a single language, culture, or nationality. In this highly original book, Glaser shows how writers working in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish during much of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were in intense conversation with one another. The marketplace was both the literal locale at which members of these different societies and cultures interacted with one another and a rich subject for representation in their art. It is commonplace to note the influence of Gogol on Russian literature, but Glaser shows him to have been a profound influence on Ukrainian and Yiddish literature as well. And she shows how Gogol must be understood not only within the context of his adopted city of St. Petersburg but also that of his native Ukraine. As Ukrainian and Yiddish literatures developed over this period, they were shaped by their geographical and cultural position on the margins of the Russian Empire. As distinctive as these writers may seem from one another, they are further illuminated by an appreciation of their common relationship to Russia. Glaser’s book paints a far more complicated portrait than scholars have traditionally allowed of Jewish (particularly Yiddish) literature in the context of Eastern European and Russian culture.Table of ContentsAmelia Glaser is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests include Russian literature and film, transnational Jewish literature, the literatures of Ukraine, the literature of immigration to the US, the Russian critical tradition, and translation theory and practice.

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Book SynopsisThis is the first-ever English language anthology of zenithism, an eclectic avant-garde movement unique to the Yugoslav region that existed 1921–1927. Zenithism’s founder Ljubomir Micić envisioned the movement as a fusion of futurism, dada, constructivism, expressionism, and proto-surrealism, driven by what he called the “barbarogenius.” A hallmark of the movement was its embrace of cross-genre writing, from Ljubomir Micić’s ciné-poem Rescue Vehicle and Branko Ve Poljanski’s lyric novel 77 Suicides to MID’s lyric philosophic treatise The Sexual Equilibrium of Money. The zenithists promoted their ideas through their journal Zenit and press Biblioteka Zenit. Reaching American readers for the first time, this anthology sheds light on an untapped chapter in European modernism ideal for the general and academic reader alike. Trade Review“The editors and translators of this volume—barbarogeniuses every one—bring to life the zany revolutionary spirit and exuberance of Zenithism. The anthology is a feast of energy and creativity.”– Ellen Elias-Bursać, Literary Translator and Independent Scholar“Bošković’s and Teref’s expertly edited and well-translated anthology will contribute to the creation of a fuller picture of the European avant-garde. By demonstrating how original movements were flourishing outside of the main European languages, this anthology invites us to re-map an important period in literary history.”–Zoran Milutinović, Professor of South Slav Literature and Modern Literary Theory, University College London“The publication of Zenithism (1921–1927)—A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology adds an important piece to the complex picture of interwar avant-garde in Europe. For a long time, zenithism was a missing piece in this history. Centered on the journal Zenit, this movement was the most prominent and internationally active avant-garde formation in Yugoslavia between World Wars. Aleksandar Bošković’s and Steven Teref’s excellent selection and expert translation of texts published in Zenit offer a vivid portrayal of the literary and visual production of this group. Their critical framing of the whole zenithist enterprise is essential. It situates this group within the European avant-garde at its peak, and places it within the dynamic social, cultural, and economic processes in the interwar Yugoslavia. As a result, we finally have a comprehensive, well-researched, and documented portrayal of zenithism in English. This volume will be indispensable for future research of the avant-garde currents in Central Europe, across the continent, and beyond.”– Branislav Jakovljević, Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities, Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University“This is the first English translation of almost the entire opus of zenithism (1921–1927), the original Yugoslav contribution to high modernist movements.The zenithist concept of the ‘barbarogenius’ and barbarism challenged the notions of cultural value that, as the collection’s editors state, 'has been created, reproduced, and re-capitalized as a cultural means for colonial oppression and economic domination.'Through carefully done translations and exhaustive introductions, the anthology spans a variety of texts—from poetry to the short novel, to flyers, to critical reviews, constructing a narrative about zenithism as an authentically Balkan utopian cultural project, as well as a socially oriented art. It contextualizes zenithism in a novel way that has not been done in previous studies of this movement, by emphasizing not only the zenithists’ practices of textual hybridity and their relations to film and radio, but also their so-called cultural banditry and conceptual writing, as well as by creating a connection with Yugoslav neo-avant-garde literary and artistic practices from the second half of the twentieth century. This is a definitive collection that should become an essential text for anybody interested in modernism.”– Tatjana Aleksić, Associate Professor of South Slavic and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, Ann ArborTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsList of TranslatorsList of IllustrationsPronunciation GuideIntroduction: You Have to Be a ZenithistThe Barbarians are Coming, or a Savage RhythmIntroductionMan and Art (February 1921), Ljubomir MicićThe Manifesto of Zenithism (June 1921), Ljubomir Micić, Yvan Goll, and Boško TokinThe Spirit of Zenithism (September 1921), Ljubomir MicićThe Barbarogenius, the Balkanization of Europe, and Cultural NihilismIntroductionZenith Manifesto 1922 (February 1922), Ljubomir MicićZenithism as the Balkan Totalizer of New Life and New Art (February 1923), Ljubomir MicićEffect on Defect (1923), Marijan Mikacin the name of zenithism [foreword], Ljubomir Micićhere360 ÷ 180 = 0joyous lamentzenith—spectera riot of atomsrush up the ropea poem for the twentieth doga prayer of the blessed cursea fanatic’s nights of lovebachelor taxagainst gossipsman’s tango with a fleathe guard on the rhine predictseffect on defectfrom Archipenko: New Plastics (September 1923)Toward Opticoplastics, Ljubomir MicićNemo propheta in patria (February 1924), Various anonymousZenithosophy: or the Energetics of Creative Zenithism (October 1924), Ljubomir MicićAntisocial Art Needs to be Destroyed (December 1924), Ljubomir MicićThe New Art (December 1924), Ljubomir Micićfrom The Monkey Phenomenon (1925)The New Zenithist Art, Marijan MikacAirplane without an Engine (1925), Ljubomir MicićBarbarism as Culture (November–December 1925), Risto RatkovićAnti-Europe (1926), Ljubomir MicićBeyond-Sense and Anti-Europethe barbarogeniusbarbarian omelethey slavssyphon—soda—bloodradio in the balkansbim bam boommade in englandavala, a tomb in the skyoh, balkan cavavanslender snakes blossomTypogram (April 1926), Ljubomir MicićZenithism through the Prism of Marxism (December 1926), Dr. M. Rasinov (Ljubomir Micić)The First Road of the Barbarogenius: Cinépoetry and the Radio-FilmIntroductionCinema Poems (October 1920), Boško TokinParis Burns (October 1921), Yvan GollFilm and the Future of Humanity (December 1921), Branko Ve PoljanskiShimmy at the Latin Quarter Graveyard (March 1922), Ljubomir MicićDamn Your Hundred Gods (Rescue Car) (October 1922), Ljubomir MicićPrologue by a Madman Before a Legion of Exceptionally Wise FliesCategorical Imperative of the Zenithist School of PoetryZenithism: Second Attack of the BarbariansZenithist Barbarogenics in 30 Actsfrom Radio-Film and the Zenithist Vertical of the Spirit (April 1923), Ljubomir MicićThe Second Road of the Barbarogenius: The Hybrid Novel, Prose Poetry, and the SerpentinellaIntroductionHere I Am! (January 1921), Branko Ve Poljanski (as Virgil Poljanski)Under the Sign of the Circle (February 1921), Branko Ve PoljanskiA Lasso around the Holy Mother’s Neck (March 1922), Branko Ve PoljanskiThe Beauty of a Horse and the Face of Queen Zita (March 1922), Branko Ve PoljanskiDada Causal Dada (May 1922), Branko Ve PoljanskiCodes of the Dada-Jok State (May 1922), Branko Ve Poljanski33 Seconds (May 1922), Branko Ve Poljanski2 ÷ 2 = 1 (July–August 1922), Branko Ve PoljanskiRadiograms (1922), Branko Ve Poljanski77 Suicides (1923), Branko Ve PoljanskiPanic under the Sun (1924), Branko Ve PoljanskiNo!C’mon, Now! [foreword], Ljubomir MicićManifestoAlarmOn Train TracksLongingAt the Hair SalonGraveyard ExpressPoem #13Trip to BrazilTick-Tock like a Crab in a TailcoatBlind Man Number 52AriseTBSing Sing We Ride the HimalayasYou, Belgrade, YouGod BeefsteakJoyous PoemTopsy-Turvy (1926), Branko Ve PoljanskiS.O.S.ManifestoContraidioticonEros300,000 Punches per SecondThe Panopticon Passes through a MirrorThe Laughter of RiflesA Steamboat in the AppendixNihilonWhistling FaceMariner’s BellYou Have Beautiful Eyes, LuciaDuskPoem About HimThe Third Road of the Barbarogenius: Conceptual WritingIntroductionThe Sexual Equilibrium of Money (1925), MIDThe Metaphysics of Nothing (1926), MIDForm Devours the Spirit [I] (April 1926), MIDForm Devours the Spirit [II] (May 1926), MIDA Tobacconist in Literature (November 15, 1925), AnonymousReview of The Sexual Equilibrium of Money (April 1926), AnonymousReview of The Metaphysics of Nothing (May 1926), AnonymousThe Barbarogenius at the Gates: Zenithist Theater, Soirées, and Public InterventionsIntroductionZenithist Theater (Zagreb, December 16, 1922), AnonymousThe First Zenithist Soirée (Belgrade, January 3, 1923), AnonymousThe Second Zenithist Soirée (Zagreb, January 31, 1923), AnonymousA Zenithist Soirée by Marijan Mikac (Petrinja, August 18, 1923), AnonymousA Zenithist Evening of Sensation (April 1925), Branko Ve PoljanskiThe Marinetti and Poljanski Dialogue (November–December 1925), Branko Ve PoljanskiRabindranath Tagore and the Zenithist Protests (December 1926), AnonymousOpen Letter to Rabindranath Tagore (December 1926), Ljubomir Micić, and Branko Ve PoljanskiThe Nadir of ZenithismIntroductionThe Red Rooster (1927), Branko Ve PoljanskiDogs Bark and Poets Sing123456789101112Afterword: The Zenithist LegacyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisVladimir Nabokov complained about the number of Dostoevsky's characters "sinning their way to Jesus." In truth, Christ is an elusive figure not only in Dostoevsky's novels, but in Russian literature as a whole. The rise of the historical critical method of biblical criticism in the nineteenth century and the growth of secularism it stimulated made an earnest affirmation of Jesus in literature highly problematic. If they affirmed Jesus too directly, writers paradoxically risked diminishing him, either by deploying faith explanations that no longer persuade in an age of skepticism or by reducing Christ to a mere argument in an ideological dispute. The writers at the heart of this study understood that to reimage Christ for their age, they had to make him known through indirect, even negative ways, lest what they say about him be mistaken for cliché, doctrine, or naïve apologetics. The Christology of Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak is thus apophatic because they deploy negative formulations (saying what God is not) in their writings about Jesus. Professions of atheism in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's non-divine Jesus are but separate negative paths toward truer discernment of Christ. This first study in English of the image of Christ in Russian literature highlights the importance of apophaticism as a theological practice and a literary method in understanding the Russian Christ. It also emphasizes the importance of skepticism in Russian literary attitudes toward Jesus on the part of writers whose private crucibles of doubt produced some of the most provocative and enduring images of Christ in world literature. This important study will appeal to scholars and students of Orthodox Christianity and Russian literature, as well as educated general readers interested in religion and nineteenth-century Russian novels.

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Book SynopsisAfter more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war.Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsAbbreviations List of Figures Introduction: Heterotopic World FictionPart One. Biopolitics: Technologies of the Individual Correlating Knowledge and Power Relations: The Birth of BiopoliticsDiscipline and Punish: Discerning the Dangerous Mrs. Dalloway: A Dangerous DayIn the Skin of a Lion: Dangerous Yearnings Part Two. Biopoetics: Technologies of the Worldly SelfFrom Biopolitics to BiopoeticsConceptsParrhēsia: Dangerous Truth Telling Bios/Logos: Living Truth Askēsis: The Art of Elaborating the Self as a Practice of FreedomExperience-Books: Altering Truths Heterotopic Methods Method 1—Disposing/Transposing the Archive: Criminal Vanishing Acts Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur, et mon frère . . .The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems Flush: A Biography Method 2—Distracting/Transacting Genealogy: Reading for One’s Life Between the ActsThe English PatientThe History of Sexuality, vol. 1Method 3—Dislocating/Transiting Strategics: Reading Biopoetic AssemblagesFoucault 1: The History of Sexuality, vols. 2, 3, 4Foucault 2: Answering Questions Woolf 1: “. . . very little persuaded of the truth of anything”Woolf 2: OrlandoWoolf 3: The WavesOndaatje 1:“[W]e can’t rely on only one voice”Ondaatje 2: WarlightOndaatje 3: Running in the FamilyOndaatje 4: The Cat’s Table Figures Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn addition to sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Haiti and the Dominican Republic share a complicated and at times painful history. Yet Transnational Hispaniola shows that there is much more to the two nations' relationship than their perceived antagonism. Rejecting dominant narratives that reinforce opposition between the two sides of the island, contributors to this volume highlight the connections and commonalities that extend across the border, mapping new directions in Haitianist and Dominicanist scholarship.Exploring a variety of topics including European colonialism, migration, citizenship, sex tourism, music, literature, political economy, and art, contributors demonstrate that alternate views of Haitian and Dominican history and identity have existed long before the present day. From a moving section on passport petitions that reveals the familial, friendship, and communal networks across Hispaniola in the nineteenth century to a discussion of the shared music traditions that unite the island today, this volume speaks of an island and people bound together in a myriad of ways.Complete with reflections and advice on teaching a transnational approach to Haitian and Dominican studies, this agenda-setting volume argues that the island of Hispaniola and its inhabitants should be studied in a way that contextualizes differences, historicizes borders, and recognizes cross-island links.Contributors: Paul Austerlitz, Nathalie Bragadir, Raj Chetty, Anne Eller, Kaiama L. Glover, Maja Horn, Regine Jean-Charles, Kiran C. Jayaram, Elizabeth Manley, April Mayes, Elizabeth Russ, Fidel J. Tavárez, Elena ValdezPublication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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