Description
Book Synopsis Students of German Literature will have asked themselves at one stage or another why certain topics have received saturation treatment of the last two centuries while others have been either ignored entirely or at best grossly neglected. This book tackles this fascinating issue and illuminates why, at various junctures, specific topics and attitudes were regarded by influential sections of society as being either inadmissable or presentable only in particular, prescribed ways. While the presentation of sexual matters such as homosexuality and lesbianism is inevitably at the heart of the book, political, social, and ideological issues also loom large. The editor has recruited a team of prominent scholars to provide a penetrating, comprehensive focus that ranges from individual writers and their works, i.e., Goethe, Hölderlin, Kafka, and Thomas Mann, to specific issues, movements and periods.
Table of Contents Chapter 1. Text and Sub-text: Reflections on the Literary Exploration of Taboo Experience
M. Swales
Chapter 2. "Velorene Töchter": Reticence and Ambiguity in German Domestic Drama in the Late Eighteenth Century
E. McInnes
Chapter 3. Saying and Not-saying in Hölderlin's Work
D. Constantine
Chapter 4. Taboos in Poetic-Realist Writers
D. Jackson
Chapter 5. Of Madness and Masochism: Sexuality in Women's Writing at the Turn of the Century
C. Weedon
Chapter 6. The Double Taboo: Male Bodies in Kafka's Der Prozeß
E. Boa
Chapter 7. The Frustrated Poet: Homosexuality and Taboo in Der Tod in Venedig
T. J. Reed
Chapter 8. Discovering a Taboo: the Nazi Past in Literary-political Discourse 1958-1967
H. Peitsch
Chapter 9. Inarticulacy: Lesbianism and Language in post-1945 German Literature
G. Paul
Chapter 10. Sex and Politics: the Case of the GDR
J.H. Reid
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
