Description
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
