Search results for ""Author Jeffrey L. High""

New essays by top international Schiller scholars on the reception of the great German writer and dramatist, emphasizing his realist aspects. The works of Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) -- an innovative and resonant tragedian and an important poet, essayist, historian, and aesthetic theorist -- are among the best known of German and world literature. Schiller's explosive original artistry and feel for timely and enduring personal tragedy embedded in timeless sociohistorical conflicts remain the topic of lively academic debate. The essays in this volume address the many flashpoints and canonicalshifts in the cyclically polarized reception of Schiller and his works, in pursuit of historical and contemporary answers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's expression of frightened admiration in 1794: "Who is this Schiller?" The responses demonstrate pronounced shifts from widespread twentieth-century understandings of Schiller: the overwhelming emphasis here is on Schiller the cosmopolitan realist, and little or no trace is left of the ultimately untenable view of Schiller as an abstract idealist who turned his back on politics. Contributors: Ehrhard Bahr, Matthew Bell, Frederick Burwick, Jennifer Driscoll Colosimo, Bernd Fischer, Gail K. Hart, Fritz Heuer, Hans H. Hiebel, Jeffrey L. High, Walter Hinderer, Paul E. Kerry, Erik B. Knoedler, Elisabeth Krimmer, Maria del Rosario Acosta López, Laura Anna Macor, Dennis F. Mahoney, Nicholas Martin, John A. McCarthy, Yvonne Nilges, Norbert Oellers, Peter Pabisch, David Pugh, T. J. Reed, Wolfgang Riedel, Jörg Robert, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Henrik Sponsel. Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor of German Studies at California State University Long Beach, Nicholas Martin is Reader in European Intellectual History at the University of Birmingham, and Norbert Oellers is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of Bonn.

Read more less

"In the Beginning was Napoleon"--"Napoleon and no end": Inspiration Bonaparte explores German responses to Bonaparte in literature, philosophy, painting, science, education, music, and film from his rise to the present. Two hundred years after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) continues to resonate as a fascinating, ambivalent, and polarizing figure. Differences of opinion as to whether Bonaparte should be viewed as the executor of the principles of the French Revolution or as the figure who was principally responsible for their corruption are as pronounced today as they were at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Contributing to what had been an uneasy German relationship with the French Revolution, the rise of Bonaparte was accompanied by a pattern of Franco-German hostilities that inspired both enthusiastic support and outraged dissent in the German-speaking states. The fourteen essays that comprise Inspiration Bonaparte examine the mythologization of Napoleon in German literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the significant impact of Napoleonic occupation on a broad range of fields including philosophy, painting, politics, the sciences, education, and film. As the contributions from leading scholars emphasize, the contradictory attitudes toward Bonaparte held by so many prominent German thinkers are a reflection of his enduring status as a figure through whom the trauma of shattered late-Enlightenment expectations of sociopolitical progress and evolving concepts of identity politics is mediated.

Read more less

WINNER of the 2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award Volume of new essays investigating Kleist's influences and sources both literary and philosophical, their role as paradigms, and the ways in which he responded to and often shattered them. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a rebel who upset canonization by employing his predecessors and contemporaries as what Steven Howe calls "inspirational foils." It was precisely a keen awareness of literary and philosophical traditions that allowed Kleist to shatter prevailing paradigms. Though little is known about what specifically Kleist read, the frequent allusions in his enduringly modern oeuvre indicate fruitful dialogues with both canonical and marginal works of European literature, spanning antiquity (The Old Testament, Sophocles), the Early Modern Period (Shakespeare, De Zayas), the late Enlightenment (Wieland, Goethe, Schiller), and the first eleven years of the nineteenth century (Mereau, Brentano, Collin). Kleist's works also evidence encounters with his philosophical precursors and contemporaries, including the ancient Greeks (Aristotle) and representatives of all phases of Enlightenment thought (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Ferguson, Spalding, Fichte, Kant, Hegel), economic theories (Smith, Kraus), and developments in anthropology, sociology, and law. This volume of new essays sheds light on Kleist's relationship to his literary and philosophical influences and on their function as paradigms to which his writings respond.

Read more less