German Literature

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

Germany has had a profound influence on English stories for children. The Brothers Grimm, The Swiss Family Robinson and Johanna Spyri's Heidi quickly became classics but, as David Blamires clearly articulates in this volume, many other works have been fundamental in the development of English chilren's stories during the 19th Centuary and beyond. Telling Tales is the first comprehensive study of the impact of Germany on English children's books, covering the period from 1780 to the First World War. Beginning with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, moving through the classics and including many other collections of fairytales and legends (Musaus, Wilhelm Hauff, Bechstein, Brentano) Telling Tales covers a wealth of translated and adapted material in a large variety of forms, and pays detailed attention to the problems of translation and adaptation of texts for children. In addition, Telling Tales considers educational works (Campe and Salzmann), moral and religious tales (Carove, Schmid and Barth), historical tales, adventure stories and picture books (including Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz) together with an analysis of what British children learnt through textbooks about Germany as a country and its variegated history, particularly in times of war.

In Making German Jewish Literature Anew, Katja Garloff traces the emergence of a new Jewish literature in Germany and Austria from 1990 to the present. The rise of new generations of authors who identify as both German and Jewish, and who often sustain additional affiliations with places such as France, Russia, or Israel, affords a unique opportunity to analyze the foundational moments of diasporic literature. Making German Jewish Literature Anew is structured around a series of founding gestures: performing authorship, remaking memory, and claiming places. Garloff contends that these founding gestures are literary strategies that reestablish the very possibility of a German Jewish literature several decades after the Holocaust. Making German Jewish Literature Anew offers fresh interpretations of second-generation authors such as Maxim Biller, Doron Rabinovici, and Barbara Honigmann as well as of third-generation authors, many of whom come from Eastern European and/or mixed-religion backgrounds. These more recent writers include Benjamin Stein, Lena Gorelik, and Katja Petrowskaja. Throughout the book, Garloff asks what exactly marks a given text as Jewish—the author's identity, intended audience, thematic concerns, or stylistic choices—and reflects on existing definitions of Jewish literature.

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.

Originally published in 1959, this first scholarly study of the origin and development of the concept of honor in German literature traces its role from ancient Germanic to modern works and shows how the transformation from external to internal conceptions of honor were influenced by Christian and Stoic ideals.

These previously published essays discuss Nietzsche's influence on Arthur Schnitzler, Carl Sternheim, Georg Kaiser, Robert Musil, and Hermann Hesse. As a Festschrift, it also contains a tribute to Herbert W. Reichert and a bibliography of his writings.

Even a casual perusal of seventeenth-century European print production makes clear that the Turk was on everyone’s mind. Europe’s confrontation of and interaction with the Ottoman Empire in the face of what appeared to be a relentless Ottoman expansion spurred news delivery and literary production in multiple genres, from novels and sermons to calendars and artistic representations. The trans-European conversation stimulated by these media, most importantly the regularly delivered news reports, not only kept the public informed but provided the basis for literary conversations among many seventeenth-century writers, three of whom form the center of this inquiry: Daniel Speer (1636-1707), Eberhard Werner Happel (1647-1690), and Erasmus Francisci (1626-1694). The expansion of the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers the opportunity to view these writers' texts in the context of Europe and from a more narrowly defined Ottoman Eurasian perspective. Ottoman Eurasia in Early Modern German Literature: Cultural Translations (Francisci, Happel, Speer) explores the variety of cultural and commercial conversations between Europe and Ottoman Eurasia as they negotiated their competing economic and hegemonic interests. Brought about by travel, trade, diplomacy, and wars, these conversations were, by definition, “cross-cultural” and diverse. They eroded the antagonism of “us and them,” the notion of the European center and the Ottoman periphery that has historically shaped the view of European-Ottoman interactions.

This is the first book to describe German literary history up to the unification of Germany in 1990. It takes a fresh look at the main authors and movements, and also asks what Germans in a given period were actually reading and writing, what they would have seen at the local theatre or found in the local lending library; it includes, for example, discussions of literature in Latin as well as in German, eighteenth-century letters and popular novels, Nazi literature and radio plays, and modern Swiss and Austrian literature. A new prominence is given to writing by women. Contributors, all leading scholars in their field, have re-examined standard judgements in writing a history for our own times. The book is designed for the general reader as well as the advanced student: titles and quotations are translated, and there is a comprehensive bibliography.