Books in the Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture series

A fascinating cultural studies account of the "e;afterlife"e; of Leichhardt, revealing both German entanglement in British colonialism in Australia, and in a broader sense, what happens when we maintain an open stance to the ghosts ofthe past.After the renowned Prussian scientist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt left the Australian frontier in 1848 on an expedition to cross the continent, he disappeared without a trace. Andrew Hurley's book complicates that view by undertaking an afterlife biography of "e;the Humboldt of Australia."e; Although Leichhardt's remains were never located, he has been sought and textually "e;found"e; many times over, particularly in Australia and Germany. He remains a significant presence, a highly productive ghost who continues to "e;haunt"e; culture. Leichhardt has been employed for all sorts of political purposes. In imperial Germany, he was a symbol of pure science, but also a bolster for colonialism. In the 20th century, he became a Nazi icon, a proto-socialist, the model for the protagonist of Nobel laureate Patrick White's famous novel Voss, as well as a harbinger of multiculturalism. He has also been put to useby Australian Indigenous cultures. Engaging Leichhardt's ghosts and those who have sought him yields a fascinating case study of German entanglement in British colonialism in Australia. It also shows how figures from the colonialpast feature in German and Australian social memory and serve present-day purposes. In an abstract sense, this book uses Leichhardt to explore what happens when we maintain an open stance to the ghosts of the past. Andrew Wright Hurley is Associate Professor in German Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. His book Into the Groove: Popular Music and Contemporary German Fiction was published by Camden House in 2015.

First representative English collection of the Sturm und Drang writer Lenz, suited for the classroom and anyone interested in German literature, the European Enlightenment, or the theory and practice of theater.Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) is, after Goethe, the most important writer of the German Sturm und Drang. Crucial in the reinvention of German literature through the reception of Shakespeare, his works contain a scathing critique of the ethical, political, and sexual regimes then prevailing in German and Eastern European territories. Both aesthetically and politically, Lenz strongly influenced later German writers - most notably Georg Buchner and Bertolt Brecht. In Germany, Lenz is still widely read and performed. Given his importance and lasting reception, it is surprising that many of his texts are not available in English. While his best-known dramas have been translated, many of his essays have not, and none of his stories or poems have been. This is especially astonishing given the growth of English-language Lenz scholarship over recent decades. This volume contains new - and, in many cases, first - English translations of Lenz's most important plays, stories, essays, and poems. It is the first representative English collection of Lenz's works. Providing reliable translations of Lenz's key writings and succinct glosses of historical and literary references, this book is a valuable resource for classroom use and for anyone interested in German literature, the European Enlightenment, or the theory and practice of theater. Martin Wagner is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Calgary. Ellwood Wiggins is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Washington.

Covers the major modernist literary works of Broch and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to his political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings.Hermann Broch (1886-1951) is best known for his two major modernist works, The Sleepwalkers (3 vols., 1930-1932) and The Death of Virgil (1945), which frame a lifetime of ethical, cultural, political, and social thought. A textile manufacturer by trade, Broch entered the literary scene late in life with an experimental view of the novel that strove towards totality and vividly depicted Europe's cultural disintegration. As fascism took over and Broch, a Viennese Jew, was forced into exile, his view of literature as transformative was challenged, but his commitment to presenting an ethical view of the crises of his time was unwavering. An important mentor and interlocutor for contemporaries such as Arendt and Canetti as well as a continued inspiration for contemporary authors, Broch wrote to better understand and shape the political and cultural conditions for a postfascist world. This volume covers the major literary works and constitutes the first comprehensive introduction in English to Broch's political, cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical writings. Contributors: Graham Bartram, Brechtje Beuker, GiselaBrude-Firnau, Gwyneth Cliver, Jennifer Jenkins, Kathleen L. Komar, Paul Michael Lutzeler, Gunther Martens, Sarah McGaughey, Judith Ryan, Judith Sidler, Galin Tihanov, Sebastian Wogenstein. Graham Bartram retired as Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Lancaster, UK. Sarah McGaughey is Associate Professor of German at Dickinson College, USA. Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

The first cohesive Faust narrative in facsimile form, German transcription, and (first-ever) English translation, plus a history of Faust illustrations and an assessment of Faust's historicity.The Faust legend, which has come down to us most famously in Goethe's tragedy but also in countless other incarnations since the late sixteenth century, was first collected and presented as a cohesive narrative (in manuscript) byChristoph Rosshirt during the 1570s. Rosshirt was also the first to provide illustrations of Faust, hand-colored by Rosshirt himself. This book offers a critical edition of Rosshirt's six tales, including an introductory chapter,a facsimile of the manuscript, a transcription and first-ever English translation on facing pages, as well as a history of Faust illustrations, with Rosshirt's own illustrations and other examples up through Delacroix, the most complete survey of such illustrations to date. A final chapter rounds out the study with an assessment of Rosshirt's significance for the Faust tradition, a review of the evidence for a historical Faust, and a rejection of his historicity (because it is unprovable) in favor of his existence only in his story - a story Rosshirt helped to tell - and in our imaginations that animate that story. J. M. van der Laan is Professor Emeritus of German at Illinois State University.

The first book to offer a cutting-edge discussion of contemporary travel writing in German, Anxious Journeys looks both at classical tropes of travel writing and its connection to current debates.The rich contemporary literature of travel has been the focus of numerous recent publications in English that seek to understand how travel narratives, with their distinctive representations of identities, places, and cultures, respond to today's globalized, high-speed world characterized by the dual mass movements of tourism and migration. Yet a corresponding cutting-edge discussion of twenty-first-century travel writing in German has until now been missing. The fourteen essays in Anxious Journeys redress this situation. They analyze texts by leading authors such as Felicitas Hoppe, Christoph Ransmayr, Julie Zeh, Navid Kermani, Judith Schalansky, Ilija Trojanow, and others, as well as topics such as Turkish-German travelogues and the relationship of comics to travel writing. The volume examines how writers engage with classic tropes of travel writing and how they react to the current sense of crisis and belatedness. It also links travel to ongoing debates about the role of the nation, mass migration, and the European project, as well as to Germany's place in the larger world order. Contributors: Karin Baumgartner, Heather Merle Benbow, Anke S. Biendarra, John Blair and Muriel Cormican, Nicole Coleman, Carola Daffner, Christina Gerhardt, Nicole Grewling, Gundela Hachmann, Andrew Wright Hurley, Christina Kraenzle, Magda Tarnawaska Senel, Monika Shafi, Sunka Simon. Karin Baumgartner is Professor of German at the University of Utah. Monika Shafi is Elias Ahuja Professor of German at the University of Delaware.

This book explores how writers adhered to, played with, and subverted the formulaic precepts of educational transformation in the German Democratic Republic.Perhaps never before has a state emphasized education to citizenship more than in the new nation founded in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic. For forty years, educational and cultural policy played a pivotal role in effortsto build and sustain a socialist state on German soil. Party and state held teachers and writers responsible for demonstrating the superiority of socialism, infusing pupils and readers with a commitment to the emerging state, andproviding persuasive role models of der neue Mensch each was challenged to become. Utilizing an innovative triangular framework, this book demonstrates how mentor-protege(e) rubrics, traditionally associated with the socialist Bildungsroman, came to characterize text-external and text-internal relations within diverse narrative forms. Thus, leading writers such as Hermann Kant, Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann, and Christoph Hein played with the genre's patterns of transformation as they engaged with the intellectual, societal, and aesthetic dilemmas of GDR life. This book shows that understanding representations of educational transformation in GDR literature, a topic largely overlooked by critics, is central to an aesthetic appreciation of that literature more broadly. Jean E. Conacher is Senior Lecturer in German within the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics atthe University of Limerick, Ireland.

Through close readings of poems covering the span of Georg Trakl's lyric output, this study traces the evolution of his strangely mild and beautiful vision of the end of days.Like much German-language poetry of the years preceding the First World War, the poems of Georg Trakl (1887-1914) are imbued with a sense of historical crisis, but what sets his work apart is the mildness and restraint of his images of universal disintegration. Trakl typically couched his vision of the end of days in images of migrating birds, abandoned houses, and closing eyelids, making his poetry at once apocalyptic, rustic, and intimate. The argument made in this study is that this vision amounts to a unitary worldview with tightly interwoven affective, ethical, social, historical, and cosmological dimensions. Often termed hermetic and obscure, Trakl's poems become more accessible when viewed in relation to the evolution of his methods and concerns across different phases, and the idiosyncrasies of his strangely beautiful later works make sense as elements of a sophisticated system of expression committed to "e;truth"e; as a transcendental order. Through close readings of poems covering the span of his lyric output, this study traces the evolution of Trakl's distinctive style and themes while attending closely to biographical and cultural contexts. Richard Millington is Senior Lecturer in German at Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand). He is the author of Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets (2012).

Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change.The study of German-language culture has been rapidly diversifying to express the vibrant multiplicity of what it is now possible to research, and teach, under the rubric of "e;German Studies."e; Responding to these developments, German in the World explores what happens when the geographic, linguistic, and temporal boundaries that have traditionally been used to define German-language culture are questioned, and are placed alongside more global perspectives. Chapters consider the transformation of the German-language cultural canon through its engagement with the world, trace the value of German Studies as an interdisciplinary subject practiced across different global locations, and investigate the impact of both on the work of organizations and practitioners entirely beyond the academy. In questioning where German-language culture can be found across these different "e;worlds,"e; German in the Worldthus uncovers the continued value of German Studies as a field of critical cultural discourse within a globalized public sphere, placing that culture at the heart of debates on Transnational and World Literature. Ultimately, thecontributions to this innovative volume demonstrate how attempts to locate German Studies in its wider geographic and social contexts result not in a discipline undone, but in a discipline reinvigorated and transformed.Contributors: Sai Bhatawadekar, Tobias Boes, Dirk Gottsche, James Hodkinson, Carlotta von Maltzan, Frauke Matthes, Ben Morgan, John K. Noyes, Emily Oliver, Kate Rigby, Benedict Schofield, Uwe Schutte, Carol Tully. James Hodkinson is Reader in German at Warwick University. Benedict Schofield is Reader in German at King's College London.

The first scholarly English translations of thirteen vital texts that elucidate the central role mountains have played across nearly five centuries of Germanophone cultural history.Mountains have occupied a central place in German, Swiss, and Austrian intellectual culture for centuries. This volume offers the first scholarly English translations of thirteen key texts from the Germanophone tradition of engagement with mountains. The selected texts span over 450 years, ranging from the early modern period to the postmodern era, and encompass several discursive modes of the mountain experience including geographical descriptions, philosophical meditations, aesthetic deliberations, and autobiographical climbing narratives. Well-known figures covered in this translational sourcebook include Conrad Gessner, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, G.W.F. Hegel, Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Simmel, Leni Riefenstahl, and Reinhold Messner. Each text is accompanied by a critical introduction that places the translated text within a broader cultural context. The dual translational-interpretational approach offered in this volume is intended to stimulate new international and interdisciplinary dialogue on the cultural history of mountains and mountaineering. Contributors: Paul Buchholz, Sean Franzel, Gundolf Graml, Kamaal Haque, Harald Hobusch, Dan Hooley, Sean Ireton, Jennifer Jenkins, Jens Klenner, Martina Kopf, Seth Peabody, Caroline Schaumann, Christoph Weber, Wilfried Wilms. Sean Ireton (University of Missouri) and Caroline Schaumann (Emory University) are also the editors of Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2012).