The Cambridge History Of German Literature

A history of German literature to 1990, written from a post-Reunification standpoint.

'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.

From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture is a collection of Roger Paulin’s groundbreaking essays, spanning the last forty years. The work represents his major research interests of Romanticism and the reception of Shakespeare in Germany, but also explores a broader range of themes, from poetry and the public memorialization of poets to fairy stories - all meticulously researched, yet highly accessible. As a comprehensive examination of German literary history in the period 1700-1900, the collection not only includes accounts of the lives and work of Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, and Gundolf (amongst others), serving to nuance our understanding of these figures in history, but also considers diverse (and often underexplored) topics, from academic freedom to the rise of travel literature. The essays have been reformulated, corrected, and updated to add references to recent works. However, the core foundations of the originals remain, and just as when they were first published, the value of these essays – to researchers, students, and all those who are interested in German literary history – cannot be overstated.

The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. Such literariness offered subversive potential beyond suggesting that real people killed themselves in a communist country. This first book-length study of fictional suicides in East German literature provides insight into the complex and dynamic rhetoric of the GDR. Blankenship's underlying claim is that GDR literature ought to be read as literature, with literary methodology, not despite the country's politically and rhetorically charged nature, but precisely because of it. Suicide in East German Literature will be of interest to scholars of GDR literature, humanities-oriented scholars of suicide, and those who are interested in the complex relationship between literature and history. Robert Blankenship is Assistant Professor of German at California State University, Long Beach.

This accessible and fresh account of German writing since 1750 is a case study of literature as a cultural and spiritual resource in modern societies. Beginning with the emergence of German language literature on the international stage in the mid-eighteenth century, the book plays down conventional labels and periodisation of German literary history in favour of the explanatory force of international cultural impact. It explains, for instance, how specifically German and Austrian conditions shaped major contributions to European literary culture such as Romanticism and the ‘language scepticism’ of the early twentieth century. From the First World War until reunification in 1990, Germany’s defining experiences have been ones of catastrophe. The book provides a compelling overview of the different ways in which German literature responded to historical disaster. They are, first, Modernism (the ‘Literature of Negation’), second, the literature of totalitarian regimes (Third Reich and German Democratic Republic), and third the various creative strategies and evasions of the capitalist democratic multi-medial cultures of the Weimar and Federal Republics. The volume achieves a balance between textual analysis and cultural theory that gives it value as an introductory reference source and as an original study and as such will be essential reading for students and scholars alike.

New essays providing an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in social and political context. This volume provides an overview of the major movements, genres, and authors of 19th-century German literature in the period from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. Although the primary focus is on imaginative literature and its genres, there is also substantial discussion of related topics, including music-drama, philosophy, and the social sciences. Literature is considered in its cultural and socio-political context, and the German literary scene takes its place in a wider European perspective. Following the editors' introduction, essays consider the impact of Romanticism on subsequent literary movements, the effectsof major movements and writers of non-German-speaking Europe on the development of German literature, and the impact of politics on the changing cultural scene. The second section presents overviews of the principal movements ofthe time (Junges Deutschland, Vormärz, Biedermeier, Poetic Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, and Impressionism), and the third section focuses on the major genres of lyric poetry, prose fiction, drama, and music-drama. The final section provides bibliographical resources in the form of a critical bibliography and a list of primary sources. Contributors to the volume are distinguished scholars of German literature, culture, and history from North America andEurope: Andrew Webber, Lilian Furst, Arne Koch, Robert Holub, Gail Finney, Ernst Grabovszki, Benjamin Bennett, Jeffrey Sammons, Thomas Pfau, Christopher Morris, John Pizer, Thomas Spencer. Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Eric Downing is Associate Professor of German at the same institution.

One of the most intriguing questions of our time is how some of the masterpieces of modernity originated in a country in which personal liberty and democracy were slow to emerge. This Companion provides an authoritative account of modern German culture since the onset of industrialisation, the rise of mass society and the nation state. Newly written and researched by experts in their respective fields, individual chapters trace developments in German culture - including national identity, class, Jews in German society, minorities and women, the functions of folk and mass culture, poetry, drama, theatre, dance, music, art, architecture, cinema and mass media - from the nineteenth century to the present. Guidance is given for further reading and a chronology is provided. In its totality the Companion shows how the political and social processes that shaped modern Germany are intertwined with cultural genres and their agendas of creative expression.