Books in the Cambridge Studies in German series

Bertolt Brecht was one of the most influential European playwrights of the twentieth century and a poet of distinction. In this volume, contributors analyse Brecht's Svendborg Poems critically and historically, discussing it in relation to questions of poetics, political commitment, exile, and the scope and limitations of political poetry.

Although the connection between German literature and philosophy has often been emphasised in relation to particular texts, little research has been undertaken into the broader dialogue between the two. This edited collection offers six chapters by leading specialists on the interplay between the work of German literary writers and philosophers.

The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. These informative and accessible readings build up a clear picture of the central themes and stylistic concerns of the best writers working in Germany today.

The Bildungsroman - the story of the development or formation of a young man - is the most famous German contribution to the European novel. This 1997 book offers detailed readings of some of the best-known novels in the German language, challenging traditional ideas about the Bildungsroman, and about the function of literature.

Although the connection between German literature and philosophy has often been emphasised in relation to particular texts, little research has been undertaken into the broader dialogue between the two. This edited collection offers six chapters by leading specialists on the interplay between the work of German literary writers and philosophers.

Bertolt Brecht was one of the most influential European playwrights of the twentieth century and a poet of distinction. In this volume, contributors analyse Brecht's Svendborg Poems critically and historically, discussing it in relation to questions of poetics, political commitment, exile, and the scope and limitations of political poetry.

Drawing on extensive archival records and published texts, Susanne Kord investigates the stories of eight famous murderesses in Germany as they were told in legal, psychological, philosophical and literary writings. A major work of German cultural history, this highly original book raises thought-provoking questions about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gender norms.

Stephanie Bird offers a detailed analysis of the twin themes of female identity and national identity in the works of three major twentieth-century German-language women writers: Ingeborg Bachmann, Anne Duden and Emine OEzdamar. This book will be of interest to literary and women's studies scholars as well as Germanists.

This book is a comprehensive study of the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine. Heine emerges here as a figure of immense European significance, whose writings need to be seen as a major contribution to the articulation of modernity.

The beginnings of psychology are usually dated from experimental psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis in the late-nineteenth century. Yet the period from 1700 to 1840 produced some highly sophisticated psychological theorising that became central to German intellectual and cultural life, well in advance of similar developments in the English-speaking world. Matthew Bell explores how this happened, by analysing the expressions of psychological theory in Goethe's Faust, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and in the works of Lessing, Schiller, Kleist and E. T. A. Hoffmann. This study pays special attention to the role of the German literary renaissance of the last third of the eighteenth century in bringing psychological theory into popular consciousness and shaping its transmission to the nineteenth century. All German texts are translated into English, making this fascinating area of European thought fully accessible to English readers for the first time.

The profound political and social changes Germany has undergone since 1989 have been reflected in an extraordinarily rich range of contemporary writing. These informative and accessible readings build up a clear picture of the central themes and stylistic concerns of the best writers working in Germany today.

This 1998 book is a survey in English of novels by German women from 1771 to 1871. It discusses the lives and works of fourteen women writers, and argues that their novels played an important role in shaping attitudes toward class, gender and the nation in the century before Germany's first unification.

This is a book-length chronological study in English of Christa Wolf's works. It traces the development and continuity of the writer's major themes and concerns against the backdrop of her constantly evolving relationship to Marxism, and documents the rise of her feminist consciousness.

This is a full-length study of the literary consequences of German reunification, and one of the few to treat contemporary Germany as a cultural and national unity. It discusses ways in which authors accommodate their national history and identity, and wider concepts of nationhood and national literatures.

This is an accessible 1996 study of the plays of Kleist (1777-1811), an important and much-studied author whose work has been highly influential in contemporary German writing. Sean Allan examines Kleist's critique of the aspirations of both Enlightenment and Romantic metaphysics, and offers resolutions of a number of long-running controversies in Kleist criticism.

This book studies works by twelve major writers of German modernism in relation to the history of the twentieth century.

Stefan Heym was Hitler's youngest literary exile. This book, the first full-length study of Heym to appear in English, outlines his exciting career, which culminated in his becoming the major dissident of the German Democratic Republic. As well as considering journalism and fiction, Peter Hutchinson discusses Heym's early poetry and drama.

This original book investigates the role played by literature in Sigmund Freud's creation and development of psychoanalysis. Graham Frankland analyses the whole range of Freud's own texts from a literary-critical perspective, providing a comprehensive reappraisal of his life's work.

If the rise of modernism is the story of a struggle between the burden of tradition and a desire to break free of it, then Rilke's poetic development is a key example of this tension at work. Taking a sceptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a solitary genius, Judith Ryan reveals how deeply his writing is embedded in the culture of its day. She traces his often desperate attempts to grapple with problems of fashion, influence and originality as he shaped his career during the crucial decades in which modernism was born. This 1999 book was the first systematic study of Rilke's trajectory from aestheticism to modernism as seen through the lens of his engagement with poetic tradition and the visual arts. It is full of surprising discoveries about individual poems. Above all, it shifts the terms of the debate about Rilke's place in modern literary history.

Professor Behler provides a view of the literary work and the artistic process developed in the German Romantic period.

In this important study Lesley Sharpe assesses Schiller's development as a dramatist, poet and thinker against the background of his life and of social, political and literary events in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, placing particular emphasis on his engagement with the relationship between art, morality and politics.

Professor Bennett examines Hofmannsthal's work in the context of literary theory and the history of philosophy.

Professor Prawer's new book documents Heinrich Heine's lifelong involvement with England and the English. It shows him to have been a witty and intelligent observer of English men and women, institutions and politics; and to have extended his observation backwards into English history and literature of the past in a way that constantly welds the past to the present.