A Companion to German Realism, 1848-1900 PDF Download

Author: Todd Curtis Kontje
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
This volume of new essays by leading scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar, canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann -- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise Mühlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von François, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the context of both German literary history and of developments in other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism; Mühlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional histories as national history in Freytag's Die Ahnen; gender and nation in Louise von François's historical fiction; theory, reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag, Stifter, and Raabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels; Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O. Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum, Nina Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is professor of German at the University of California, San Diego.

Author: Joe McElhaney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470670975
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 623

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Book Description
A Companion to Fritz Lang “Fritz Lang’s movie-making spans a major part of the history of cinema, across genres, styles, and national contexts. With smartness and sharpness, the essays in this essential volume come from many angles to capture the richness of Lang’s cinema and bring great insight to its study.” Dana Polan, Cinema Studies, NYU Fritz Lang’s influence on cinema cannot be overstated, with a career that stretched from the silent era in Germany to the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s, from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, from Depression America to the McCarthy era. One of the best known émigrés from Germany’s school of Expressionism, Lang is also credited with influencing the emergence of film noir. A Companion to Fritz Lang offers the first full-scale collection of scholarship available in English on one of the most important filmmakers of all time. Addressing much of Lang’s voluminous body of work, from Metropolis and M, to lesser-known titles such as Western Union and Clash by Night, this volume offers a superb overview of Lang’s cinema with revealing insights into his enduring influence on directors such as Godard, Scorsese, Chabrol, and Tarantino. The two dozen essays presented here are an unrivaled and up-to-the-minute assessment of the prolific and resilient life and vision of one of cinema’s greatest auteurs.

Author: Brent Orlyn Peterson
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 9780814332009
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
A study of the content, development, and transmission of German identity during the nineteenth century as Germany's national narrative took shape in historical fiction and in both popular and academic history. The German-speaking inhabitants of central Europe did not automatically think of themselves as "Germans"--not before 1871 and not always after unification. In fact, they spoke mutually incomprehensible dialects, owed allegiance to different leaders, worshiped in different churches, and would not have recognized each other's customs. If asked about their identity, these prospective Germans might have answered Austrian, Bavarian, or Prussian, and they could as easily have used more local labels or resorted to occupational markers. For this disparate population to think of itself as "German," that word had to acquire content--people had to learn a whole set of stories they could tell themselves and to others in answer to the question of identity. History, Fiction, and Germany chronicles how German nationalism developed simultaneously with the historical novel and the field of history, both at universities and in middlebrow reading material. The book examines Germany's emerging national narrative as nineteenth-century writers adapted it to their own visions and to changing circumstances. These writers found and popularized the nation's heroes and heroines, demonized its villains and enemies, and projected the nation's hopes and dreams for the future. Author Brent O. Peterson argues that it was the production and consumption of national history--the writing and reading of the nation--that filled Germany with Germans. Although the task of national narration was never complete and never produced a single, universally accepted version of German national identity, tales from Germans' gradually shared history did more to create Germany than any statesman, general, or philosopher. History, Fiction, and Germany provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of German studies, as well as anyone interested in history and the articulation of national identity.

Author: Helen Fronius
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351565621
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
German women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been the subject of feminist literary critical and historical studies for around thirty years. This volume, with contributions from an international group of scholars, takes stock of what feminist literary criticism has achieved in that time and reflects on future trends in the field. Offering both theoretical perspectives and individual case studies, the contributors grapple with the difficulties of appraising 'non-feminist' women writers and genres from a feminist perspective and present innovative approaches to research in early women's writing. This inclusive and cross- disciplinary collection of essays will enrich the study of German women's writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and contribute to contemporary debates in feminist literary criticism. Anna Richards is Lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, University of London. Helen Fronius is College Lecturer in German at Keble College, University of Oxford.

Author: Petra S. McGillen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501351575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures (Awarded by the MLA) With an innovative approach that combines material media history, media theory, and literary poetics, this book reconstructs the great German writer Theodor Fontane's creative process. Petra McGillen follows Fontane into the engine room of his text production. Analyzing a wealth of unexplored archival evidence--which includes a collection of the author's 67 extant notebooks, along with an array of other "paper tools," such as cardboard boxes, envelopes, and slips--McGillen demonstrates how Fontane compiled his realist prose works. That is, he assembled them from premediated sources, literally with scissors and glue, in an extraordinarily inorganic and radically intertextual manner that turned "writing" into a process of ongoing remix. By exploring the far-reaching implications of Fontane's creative practices for our understanding of his authorship, originality, and poetics, this book opens up a completely new way to think about his works and, by extension, 19th-century literary realism. This conceptualization of authors' notebooks as creative tools makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the history of writing media in several disciplines, from German studies and literary studies to media history, and to our understanding of the relationship between mass media and literary creativity in the late 19th century.

Author: Charlotte Woodford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351191292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
"In novels written at the end of the long nineteenth century, women in Germany and Austria engaged with some of the most pressing social questions of the modern age. Charlotte Woodford analyses a wide range of such works, many of them largely forgotten, in the context of the contemporary cultural discourses that informed their creation, such as writings on pacifism and socialism, prostitution, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases. Women's experience of contemporary medicine as patients and doctors is a fascinating theme, treated here by several authors. Through a close reading of works by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Minna Kautsky, Gabriele Reuter, Helene Bohlau, Ilse Frapan, Hedwig Dohm, Lou Andreas-Salome, and others, this study shows how writers' determination to validate women's experience of the problems of modernity informed the aesthetic development of the novel by women."

Author: Caroline Schaumann
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137542225
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This book offers essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films, advancing ecocritical models for German Studies, and introducing environmental issues in German literature and film to a broader audience. This volume contextualizes the broad-ranging topics and authors in terms of the Anthropocene, beginning with Goethe and the Romantics and extending into twenty-first-century literature and film. Addressing the growing need for environmental awareness in an international humanities curriculum, this book complements ecocritical analyses emerging from North American and British studies with a specifically German Studies perspective, opening the door to a transnational understanding of how the environment plays an integral role in cultural, political, and economic issues.

Author: Stefani Engelstein
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042032952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Illuminates the treatment of violence in the German cultural tradition between the French Revolution and the Holocaust and Second World War.

Author: Charlotte Woodford
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 1571134875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
A much-needed look at the fiction that was actually read by masses of Germans in the late nineteenth century, and the conditions of its publication and reception. The late nineteenth century was a crucial period for the development of German fiction. Political unification and industrialization were accompanied by the rise of a mass market for German literature, and with it the beginnings ofthe German bestseller.Offering escape, romance, or adventure, as well as insights into the modern world, nineteenth-century bestsellers often captured the imagination of readers well into the twentieth century and beyond. However, many have been neglected by scholars. This volume offers new readings of literary realism by focusing not on the accepted intellectual canon but on commercially successful fiction in its material and social contexts. It investigates bestsellers from writers such as Freytag, Dahn, Jensen, Raabe, Viebig, Stifter, Auerbach, Storm, Möllhausen, Marlitt, Suttner, and Thomas Mann. The contributions examine the aesthetic strategies that made the works sucha success, and writers' attempts to appeal simultaneously on different levels to different readers. Bestselling writers often sought to accommodate the expectations of publishers and the marketplace, while preserving some sense ofartistic integrity. This volume sheds light on the important effect of the mass market on the writing not just of popular works, but of German prose fiction on all levels. Contributors: Christiane Arndt, Caroline Bland, Elizabeth Boa, Anita Bunyan, Katrin Kohl, Todd Kontje, Peter C. Pfeiffer, Nicholas Saul, Benedict Schofield, Ernest Schonfield, Martin Swales, Charlotte Woodford. Charlotte Woodford is Lecturer in German and Directorof Studies in Modern Languages at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. Benedict Schofield is Senior Lecturer in German and Head of the Department of German at King's College London.

Author: Benedict Schofield
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1907322221
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Nineteenth-century Germany witnessed many debates on the nature of the nation, both before and after unification in 1871. Bourgeois authors engaged closely with questions of class and national identity, and resourcefully sought to influence the collective destiny of the German people through works of popular fiction and cultural history. Typical of this trend was the realist writer Gustav Freytag (1816-1895), the most widely read novelist of his era. Innovatively exploring all of Freytag's works (poetry, drama, novels, history, journalism, biography and literary theory), Schofield examines how his popular writing systematically re-imagined the social structures of German society, embedding political agendas within contemporary stories of private lives. Connecting the aesthetics of Realism with the political aims of the bourgeoisie, the study both reassesses Freytag's position within the German literary canon and re-evaluates received opinion on the socio-political function of Realism in German culture. Benedict Schofield is Lecturer in German at King's College London.