Search results for ""Author Professor Andrew Cusack""

Traces the career of the widely read cultural historian Johannes Scherr and his development of a new kind of historical writing for the increasingly globalized 19th-century world. The German nineteenth century saw a boom in publishing and reading that created opportunities not only for Dichter, creators of great literature, but also for Schriftsteller, authors of the second rank. Among the latter were cultural mediators who helped readers negotiate the ever-expanding galaxy of print. Few achieved greater prominence than Johannes Scherr, whose remarkable career as a critic, anthologist, and historian of German and world literature began in the turbulent Vormärz era and continued during years of exile in the unlikely setting of the Zurich Polytechnic. He wrote from the vantage point of Switzerland, but his books were published in Germany, where his polemical style found favor. Andrew Cusack's study traces the process of Scherr's literary socialization as mediator in the "contact zone" formed by the Kingdom of Württemberg and Switzerland, whose liberal project of Volksbildung inspired him. It considers how his liminal position between nations and between the humanities and the sciences led him to develop a form of historical authorship for the increasingly globalized nineteenth century. The book considers Scherr's engagement with the totalizing paradigms of cultural history and world literature and sets his pessimistic worldview in the context of the materialism and violent political agitation that threatened democratic values in Switzerland and elsewhere.

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Pathbreaking examination of the prominent 19th-c. motif with an eye toward literature as social commentary. The wanderer is an indispensable part of the German cultural imaginary. The nineteenth-century prominence of the motif owes much to the self-conception of the intellectual pioneers of the day as wanderers. The motif is also a keyto interpretation of the social and cultural phenomena of a turbulent century that began with the emancipatory claims of the Enlightenment and ended in untrammeled industrialism. Writers from Goethe to Büchner, Fontane to Holtei were keenly aware of the motif's interpretive value, attempting to grasp with it not only such developments as mass migration and disappearing institutions but also unprecedented opportunities for artistic and scientific innovation. This book re-interprets canonical works such as Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels, Heine's Harzreise, and Büchner's Lenz, examines underresearched works by Fontane and Raabe, and charts new territory with readings of works by Gotthelf and Holtei -- a selection of texts that reveals the vast scope and changing function of the wanderer motif. Andrew Cusack pays scrupulous attention to the historical specificity of each work and to its relationship to contemporary aesthetic and philosophical currents, revealing the wanderer motif to be a significant vehicle of cultural memory that sustained the ideas of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism. Andrew Cusack is a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin.

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The first book in English on the German Gothic in over thirty years, consisting of new essays investigating the internationality of the Gothic mode. The literary mode of the Gothic is well established in English Studies, and there is growing interest in its internationality. Gothic fiction is seen as transgressive, especially in the way it crosses borders, often illicitly -- for instance, in the form of plagiarized texts or pseudo-translations of nonexistent sources. In the 1790s, when the English Gothic novel was emerging, the real or ostensible source of many of these uncanny texts was Germany. Thisfirst book in English dedicated to the German Gothic in over thirty years is aimed at students and researchers in German Studies and English Studies, and redresses deficiencies in existing sources, which are outdated, piecemeal, or not sufficiently grounded in German Studies. The book examines the international reception of German Gothic since the 1790s heyday of the Gothic novel in Britain and Germany; traces a line of Gothic writing in German to thepresent day; and inquires into the extraliterary impact of German Gothic. Thus the essays do full justice to the Gothic as a site of conflict and exchange -- both between cultures and between discourses. Contributors:Peter Arnds, Silke Arnold-de Simine, Jürgen Barkhoff, Matthias Bickenbach, Andrew Cusack, Mario Grizelj, Jörg Kreienbrock, Barry Murnane, Victor Sage, Monika Schmitz-Emans, Catherine Smale, Andrew Webber Andrew Cusack is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Institut für Kulturwissenschaft of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Barry Murnane is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.

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"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.

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