German Baroque Literature

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

The 18 investigations collected in this volume, 4 of which are published for the first time, represent a cross section of the research in German baroque literature by the American scholar, Blake Lee Spahr. Individual issues of «German Baroque Literature» are discussed from a broad perspective, while specific problems are dealt with via a neopositivistic approach which highlights the limitations as well as the possibilities of American research in German literature.

"What is the Baroque? Where did it come from and where did it go? Why do we have to ask these questions? Because art historians seem largely satisfied with their answers and most scholars of German literature are not satisfied, yet have stopped asking.This book discerns in the Baroque an aesthetic phenomenon that crosses both media and national boundaries in its celebration of excess and its disintegration of system, unity, and identity. The compositional principles and theoretical implications of the Baroque, as it first arose in Italian art, find expression in German poetics, drama, poetry, and narrative ? expression accessible only through resolute close reading. Readings of Bernini, Borromini, Velázquez, Rubens, Fracanzano, and de Hooch precipitate readings of Opitz, Gryphius, Fleming, Zesen, Hoffmannswaldau, and Grimmelshausen, demonstrating that seventeenth-century German literature both is Baroque and confirms what the Baroque is."--Page 4 of cover.