Drawing from case studies in 20th century German literature and theory, the contributors to this volume explore the multiple dimensions behind and alongside authorship that constitutes the "ecology" of writing.Over the last few decades, a resurgence of interest in historical and contemporary writing processes, fueled in part by the development of digital media, has developed alongside the emergence of new conceptions of material-human agency and the environment. Wh...

The Emprise of Poetry analyzes the insidious entwinement of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in modern and contemporary German culture through the writings of one of its most acclaimed literary figures: Dresden native Durs Grünbein (1962-).Michael Eskin offers an unprecedented view of the American-cum-Jewish discontents at the heart of modern and present-day German culture through the exemplary lens of the work of Durs Grünbein, ...

Writing the Mountains reconsiders the role of mountains in German language fiction from 1800 to the present and argues that in a range of texts, from E.T.A. Hoffmann's “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” (1819) to Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten (1995) and beyond, mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate aesthetic and narrative innovation. In contrast to dominant critical approaches to the Alpine landscape in literature, in which mountain ranges oft...

A long-overdue reassessment of post-1918 Salzburg as a distinct Austrian cultural hub that experimented in moving beyond war and empire into a modern, self-consciously inclusive, and international center for European culture.For over 300 years, Salzburg had its own legacy as a city-state at an international crossroads, less stratified than Europe's colonial capitals and seeking a political identity based in civic participation with its own economy and politics. Aft...

Examines Jewish-German “tropes” in Hélène Cixous's oeuvre and life and their impact on her work as a feminist, poet, and playwright.Hélène Cixous is a poet, philosopher, and activist known worldwide for her manifesto on Écriture feminine (feminine writing) and for her influential literary texts, plays, and essays. While the themes were rarely present in her earlier writings, Germany and Jewish-German family figures and topics have significantly informed mo...

Attention is fundamental to how we experience reality, and yet this notion has been understood and practised in very different ways across history. This interdisciplinary study explores the dynamic relationship between attention and its supposed opposite, distraction, as it unfolds from the eighteenth century to the present day. Its primary focus is on twentieth-century Germany and Austria, where matters of (in)attention gained a unique urgency during a period of social change and politica...

Allegories of Format examines the significance of format to the literary oeuvre of the nineteenth-century Swiss author, Gottfried Keller (1819–1890), best known for his 1855 novel, Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich). Malika Maskarinec understands format as the organization of a media object's relationship to a world of objects and persons; format orders a text's co...

Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is not only a towering masterpiece of German literature but also an impressively rich and razor-sharp assessment of life in the beginning of the twentieth century. Musil can be regarded as one of the most original and hard-hitting cultural critics of his time. This book explores in detail the cultural critique at work in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Firstly, the place of morality and ideology in Musil’s critique is explained and ...

"Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors' use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and ...

This book investigates the crucial question of ‘restitution’ in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald’s oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics.Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Iris...

" A much-needed study of the aesthetics and cultural mores of the Third Reich . . . rich in detail and documentation." ( Kirkus Reviews)Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler's enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda ma...

Memory Rose into Threshold Speech gathers the poet Paul Celan's first four books, written between 1952 and 1963, which established his reputation as the major post-World War II German-language poet.Celan, a Bukovinian Jew who lived through the Holocaust, created work that displays both great lyric power and an uncanny ability to pinpoint totalitarian cultural and political tendencies. His quest, however, is not only reflective: there is in...