Description
Book SynopsisRecovering Walter Benjamin's connection to seventeenth-century Baroque literature and political theory.
Trade ReviewNewman's study offers an astonishingly thorough reconstruction of the Trauerspiel book’s enabling intellectual conditions, paying special attention to the debates in art history, literary history, and theology since the nineteenth century and around World War I.... Newman’s provocative study offers an image of Benjamin that runs counter to the accepted version of the writer as the quintessentially cosmopolitan, border-crossing intellectual... [and] sets news standards for a return to archival research, historical reconstruction, and philological rigor in Benjamin studies.
* Monatshefte *
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Textual NoteIntroduction: Benjamin's Baroque: A Lost Object?1. Inventing the Baroque: A Critical History of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Debates
The Renaissance of the German Baroque in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue"
Locating Baroque Style
Origin and the "Heroic" Age of the German Literary Baroque2. The Plays Are the Thing: Textual Politics and the German Drama
The Origin of the Silesian School: Nationalism and the Baroque Tragic Drama
Collecting the Baroque: Editing the German Dramatic Tradition
The Task of the Translator: Shakespeare as German Tragic Drama3. Melancholy Germans: War Theology, Allegory, and the Lutheran Baroque
Benjamin's Hamlet in the Crosshairs of War Theology
Reforming the Baroque: Benjamin on Warburg on Luther
Allegory, Emblems, and Gryphius’s Catharina von GeorgienConclusion: Baroque Legacies: National Socialism’s BenjaminBibliography
Index
