Relations Stop Nowhere

This book attempts for the first time a comparative literary history of Germany and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its material does not come from the familiar overlaps of individual German and American writers, but from the work of the literary historians of the two countries after 1815, when American intellectuals took Germany as a model for their project to create an American national literature. The first part of the book examines fundamental structural affinities between the two literary histories and the common problems these caused, especially in questions of canon, realism, aesthetics and in the marginalization of popular and women's writing. In the second part, significant figures whose work straddle the two literatures - from Sealsfield and Melville, Whitman and Thomas Mann to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bellow - are discussed in detail, and the arguments of the first part are shown in their relevance to understanding major writers. This book is not merely comparative in scope: it shows that only international comparison can explain the course of American literary history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. As recent developments in American Studies explore the multi-cultural and 'hybrid' nature of the American tradition, this book offers evidence of the dependencies which linked American and German national literary history.

New edition of highly acclaimed book examining Darwin's work in a literary/cultural context.

Henry James wrote with an imperial elegance of style, whether his subjects were American innocents or European sophisticates, incandescent women or their vigorous suitors. His omniscient eye took in the surfaces of cities, the nuances of speech, dress, and manner, and, above all, the microscopic interactions, hesitancies, betrayals, and self-betrayals that are the true substance of relationships. The entirely new Portable Henry James provides an unparalleled range of this great body of work: seven major tales, including Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, "The Beast in the Jungle," and "The Jolly Corner"; a sampling of revisions James made to some of his most famous work; travel writing; literary criticism; correspondences; autobiography; descriptions of the major novels; and parodies by famous contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The essays in this collection explore the question of the human, both as a contested concept and as it relates to, and functions within, the wider global conjuncture. The authors explore the theoretical underpinnings of the term “human,” inviting the reader to reflect upon the contemporary human condition, to identify opportunities and threats in the changes ahead, and to determine what aspects of our species we should abandon or strive to maintain. The volume approaches these ideas from a myriad of perspectives, but the authors are united in their abstention from rejecting humanism outright or, indeed, fully endorsing posthumanism‘s teleological narrative of accelerated progress and perfectability. Instead, the authors argue that the term “human” itself is better understood as a concept perpetually undergoing revision, and is necessarily subject to scrutiny. The contributors here are thus concerned with investigating the following questions: What does it mean to be human, or to have a self? What is the current place or status of the human in the contemporary world? As technology is increasingly used to modify our bodies and minds, to what extent should we alter – and how can we improve – our very understanding of human nature? The authors contend that literature is the art form best placed to answer these questions. In its dynamism and discursiveness, literature has the capacity to both reflect dominant discourses and ideologies, as well as to generate and even anticipate social change; to critique and refine conventional ideas and existing cultural modes, and to envision new possibilities for the future. The human and its literary representation, in other words, are inherently intertwined.

Henry James's Style of Retrospect traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction. The 'late personal writings' of the book's subtitle are works of retrospective non-fiction. They are a varied group, representing a broad array of genres and occasions: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. Oliver Herford proposes that we read the late personal writings as a coherent sequence, bound together by a close texture of cross-references and allusive echoes, and united by James's newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. Closely analyzing the style of these writings, this study offers a boldly revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. A linked series of innovative close readings takes the major works of this period in sequence, addressing a key point of style in each: particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected and sometimes actively slighted in analyses of James's late work. Henry James's Style of Retrospect asks what it means for so distinguished a novelist to alter the foundations of his written manner so strikingly in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.

Critical Forms is an account of the generic forms in which literary criticism has been undertaken. It examines chiefly Anglophone literary criticism, with comparative discussion of French and German material, from around 1750 to the present and examines prefaces, selections and anthologies, reviews, lectures, dialogues, letters, and life-writing. Though not intended to be an exhaustive history of the period, Critical Forms begins in the mid-eighteenth century with the emergence of something like the forms (chiefly, the essay and the treatise) in which criticism is still predominantly practised. In order at least to complicate this predominance, the book documents an abiding plurality in the forms of literary critical writing in the subsequent period, leading up to the present. Ross Wilson both questions the status of the essay and treatise as the 'natural' forms of literary criticism and shows that the history of literary criticism is much more formally various and innovative than the usual ways of recounting that history as a succession of schools and movements would allow. Critical Forms harbours the hope that it will make available a wider array of forms for the practice of literary criticism today; it is this hope that licenses its own experiments in critical form.

This History explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era.

The prominent scholar-contributors to this volume share their experiences developing the field of US German Studies and their thoughts on literature and interdisciplinarity, pluralism and diversity, and transatlantic dialogue.