A Comprehensive Interpretation Of The Life And Work Of Christa Wolf 20th Century German Writer

Christa Wolf has been celebrated as one of the most innovative German-speaking postwar writers and is the recipient of many international awards and prizes. Her fiction has also earned her censorship and international criticism. Her prose brilliantly depicts East and West Germany's path to coming to terms with the influence of the Hitler regime. This study examines her fiction, speeches, and essays, illustrating how the trinity of identity, socialization and artistic creativity evolves and manifests itself in her writing.

Some authors strongly criticized attempts to rebuild a German literary culture in the aftermath of World War II, while others actively committed themselves to 'dealing with the German past.' There are writers in Austria and Switzerland that find other contradictions of contemporary life troubling, while some find them funny or even worth celebrating. German postwar literature has, in the minds of some observers, developed a kind of split personality. In view of the traumatic monstrosities of the previous century that development may seem logical to some. The Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature is devoted to modern literature produced in the German language, whether from Germany, Austria, Switzerland or writers using German in other countries. This volume covers an extensive period of time, beginning in 1945 at what was called 'zero hour' for German literature and proceeds into the 21st century, concluding in 2008. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on writers, such as Nobel Prize-winners Heinrich Bsll, GYnter Grass, Elias Canetti, Elfriede Jelinek, and W. G. Sebald. There are also entries on individual works, genres, movements, literary styles, and forms.

In an authorial class with dramatists and authors of literary prose such as Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann, Brecht, and Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) remains prominent in international evaluations of artistic genius when measured by enduring popular and artistic reception; legal, philosophical, and scientific criticism; and resonance of political rage. Scholars have long been fascinated by Kleist’s biography and works, in no small part due to his influence on authors, philosophers, political thinkers, and filmmakers, who regard Kleist as among the most accessible of “classic” artists — one whose relevance requires neither theoretical introduction nor literary-historical justification. The present volume addresses two centuries of engagement with Kleist and his works from an angle that has proven most important to their popular canonical status — his artistic and political legacies. What mattered to Kleist has mattered to centuries of readers, and thus all the more to artists and thinkers with similarly urgent messages to convey.

This book presents a brief biography of Christa Wolfe's life and critical interpretation and discussion of her works.

How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.

Resch explores central questions about Wolf's life and work that have been raised by scholars and readers alike: why Wolf, who enjoyed unrestricted travel privileges, remained in the East when she could easily have defected; how she was able to survive artistically in an authoritarian regime; which qualities in her writing earned the respect of major critics on both sides of the Wall; why she has chosen not to identify with the feminist movement; and what she has contributed to German and world literature.