German Language & Literature

This volume of sharply focused essays by an international team of scholars deals not only with the most significant literary, philosophical, and cultural aspects of German Romanticism -- one of the most influential, albeit highly controversial movements in the history of German literature -- but also with the history and status of scholarship on the literature of the period.

This book describes German literary history up to the unification of Germany in 1990. Contributors, all leading scholars in their field, take a fresh look at the main authors and movements, and also ask 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 prominence is given to writing by women.

This new edition of Mary and Henry Garland's classic Oxford Companion to German Literature substantially revises and extends its coverage, making an invaluable reference work available to a new generation of readers. Designed to be a reliable source of information on the whole sweep of literature from German-speaking countries from the eighth century onwards, the Companion now comes right up to the mid-1990s, including recent works such as Gunter Grass's controversial novel about the unification of East and West Germany, Ein weites Feld (1995). The entries, arranged in a single alphabetical sequence, cover authors and their major works, as well as historical, intellectual, and cultural backgrounds.

Although the importance of the interplay of literature and philosophy in Germany has often been examined within individual works or groups of works by particular authors, little research has been undertaken into the broader dialogue of German literature and philosophy as a whole. Philosophy and German Literature 1700–1990 offers six chapters by leading specialists on the dialogue between the work of German literary writers and philosophers through their works.

The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, first published in 2004, provides a broad ranging introduction to the major trends in the development of the German novel from the 1890s to the present. Written by an international team of experts, it encompasses both modernist and realist traditions, and also includes a look back to the roots of the modern novel in the Bildungsroman of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The structure is broadly chronological, but thematically-focused chapters examine topics such as gender anxiety, images of the city, war, and women's writing; within each chapter, key works are selected for close attention.

German poetry has long held a special place within the Western literary tradition. Its major achievements include Luther's hymns, Goethe's unequaled poetic versatility, the Romantics' lyric songs and the challenging poetry of Hlderlin, Rilke and Celan. Combining readings of traditional poems with fresh examples, Judith Ryan conveys the rich rewards that come with reading German poetry. Organized thematically, the book demonstrates the significance of the poems in their time while also showing their resonance in later periods. The nuanced readings in this book serve as ideal examples for close engagement with the primary texts. Quotations are given in the original German and translated into English prose.