The Dramas Of Heinrich Von Kleist A Biographical And Critical Study

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For over 150 years, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) has been one of the most widely read and performed German authors. His status in the literary canon is firmly established, but he has always been one of Germany's most contentiously discussed authors. Today's critical debate on his unique prose narratives and dramas is as heated as ever. Many critics regard Kleist as a lone presager of the aesthetics and philosophies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism. Yet there can be no question that he responds in his works and letters to the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates of his time. During the last thirty years, the scholarship on Kleist's work and life has departed from the existentialist wave of the 1950s and early 1960s and opened up new avenues for coming to terms with his unusual talent. The present volume brings together the most important and innovative of these newer scholarly approaches: the essays include critically informed, up-to-date interpretations of Kleist's most-discussed stories and dramas. Other contributions analyze Kleist's literary means and styles and their theoretical underpinnings. They include articles on Kleist's narrative and theatrical technique, poetic and aesthetic theory, philosophical and political thought, and insights from new biographical research. Contributors: Jeffrey L. Sammons, Jost Hermand, Anthony Stephens, Bianca Theisen, Hinrich C. Seeba, Bernhard Greiner, Helmut J. Schneider, Tim Mehigan, Susanne Zantop, Hilda M. Brown, and Seán Allan. Bernd Fischer is Professor of German and Head of the Department of German at Ohio State University.

Description and evaluation of the most important biographical, autobiographical, and critical sources for 146 dramatics worldwide.

Kleist's tragedy Penthesilea is approached from various angles, including the biographical and literary-historical one, to place it in the context of German drama ca. 1800. A detailed critical analysis is provided in which emphasis is laid on imagery, style and techniques of presentation of the tragic issues. On this basis the view is advanced that in Penthesilea Kleist succeeded in solving the problems which had prevented his achieving a «grand tragedy» with «Robert Guiscard», by creating a unique substitute for Choric commentary in the form of «gradualistic» commentaries on the action, strategically presented by certain characters, principally by means of key-images.

In this volume an inquiry into the nature of the creative process is attempted by paying close attention to the lives of various artists, poets, novelists and playwrights, and selected works of each in order to demonstrate an essential relationship between the two, and that it is most difficult to delineate the nuances of the creative act by treating them as separate entitites. Emphasis is placed upon the effect of early trauma, such as object loss and various forms of deprivation, as a powerful unconscious motivating factor and upon the dream and transitional object as facilitators of the creative effort.

In the wake of the revolutionary wars, the figure of the cross-dressed woman proliferated in novels, plays, popular tales, and real-life accounts that circulated throughout Germany. Sometimes appearing in soldier's garb and engaging in battle like Joan of Arc, other times donning overalls and plying a trade, and female cross-dresser tested the revolutionary ideas of freedom and equality. Perhaps her most provocative challenge, however, was to contemporary notions of what it meant to be a women or a man.