Books in the Germanic Literatures series

In an era of social crisis and change at the end of the 19th century, the German poet Stefan George created a modern social imaginary for homosexual men. The newly-coined term 'homosexual' gave expression to an emerging category of modern man. But in discovering himself, the modern homosexual found little resonance in the society around him. Through his poetry George created a sense of connectedness and imagined possibilities of liaison, friendship and community among homosexual men where none had existed before. In volumes of verse from the early 1890s until his final volume in 1928, George created a lyric vita, tracing the contours of a homosexual life in language that moves from dark to light, loneliness to companionship. But it is not an easy journey. The period in which George wrote was an era of normative, even militant masculinity. As war raged, George's poetry engaged with tragedy and grief at the loss of the men he loved. Yet his lyric vita ends with a final poetic statement of refusal, which is also the poet at his most authentic: a refusal to mask his true self.Peter Morgan is Professor of European Studies at the University of Western Australia.

The Scandinavian countries regularly top ranking lists for happiness, and are, along with Germany, among the most desired destinations for immigration. But the journey towards them can be arduously challenging, and even on arrival the welcome is often ambiguous. Comparing three novels each from the literatures of Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden, this book follows the migratory journey chronologically to explore its impact on the characters' lives, bodies and self-understanding.Through these individually felt experiences, Anja Tröger sheds light on the social and political structures causing conflict and struggle for immigrants. Drawing parallels across national borders, she contends that fiction can constitute a counter-discourse to the marginalisation and othering of refugees and asylum seekers: it can reimagine the lives and voices of those who are usually unheard and unseen.Anja Tröger is Teaching Fellow in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Radical bodily transformation can be shocking, terrifying and wonderful. But what makes it such compelling literary subject matter, and what place does it have in modern Germany? Tara Beaney analyses metamorphosis in literary texts from the Romantic period onwards, focusing on the affects involved. This emphasis allows for a unique insight into ways of experiencing bodily change, into threatened identities, and into changing affective styles across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ranging from canonical texts by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Franz Kafka to the work of post-war and post-Wende writers Marie Luise Kaschnitz and Jenny Erpenbeck, as well as the cross-cultural writer Yoko Tawada, this study shows how narratives of metamorphosis help us negotiate the social and political changes, and the experience of shifting boundaries and identities, that are so pertinent to modern Germany.Tara Beaney is Lecturer in German at the University of Aberdeen.