Drama and "Ideenschmuggel"

Drama and
Author: K. Scott Baker
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2008
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9783039110957

This monograph details Gutzkow's recurring use of performance-within-the-play as a means of encouraging an active, political response by the audience. He incorporates an internal audience viewing a performance on stage in order to model an ideal of dramatic reception for the audiences of his own play. Gutzkow structures the narrative contextualization of these performances as reflections of specific issues in the German states of the Vormärz. Beginning with an overview of theoretical and literary texts from the 1830s, this study traces Gutzkow's transferral of self-reflexive structures from his novels of this decade into his first staged play, Richard Savage (1839), and on through Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1844) and Uriel Acosta (1845). It concludes by portraying Der Königsleutnant (1849) as a transitional work that shows Gutzkow's decision to return to the novel as a consequence of the failure of his plays to attain the reception he intended. By using the coherency of the communicated message instead of fealty to aesthetic norms as the evaluative criteria for discussing Gutzkow's plays, the book exposes an innovative mode of specifically literary social criticism in these works that complements their traditional assessment as documentation of the cultural history of Liberalism in this period.

Public Voices

Public Voices
Author: Karin Baumgartner
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783039115754

This book examines the possibilities of political theorizing in the writings of early nineteenth-century German women and develops a new theory of reading women's domestic fiction. Drawing on feminism, new historicism, and hermeneutics for its theoretical framework, the study suggests significant changes to Jürgen Habermas's concept of the public sphere and women's role within it. The book re-evaluates the genre of domestic fiction and traces its use by women writers for political symbolism. Through novels, educational treatises, conduct manuals, poetry, and history books for women and children Caroline Fouqué, the principal voice in this study, and other authors of the period participated in the key debates of the early nineteenth century, among them the anguished discussions about the crisis in masculinity after the defeat of the Prussian army in 1806, the discourses of national identity, the construction of a national past, and the reorganization of the feudal state.

The Intersection of Material and Poetic Economy

The Intersection of Material and Poetic Economy
Author: Anna Helm
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9783039110841

This work explores the intersection of the material and poetic economies in Soll und Haben and Der Nachsommer. It demonstrates how the main poetical strategies of the two novels, dichotomization (Soll und Haben) and total economization (Der Nachsommer), are defined by economic themes, structures, and forms. The «economopoetics» of the novels, i.e. the multitude of connections between economics and aesthetics, pervades the texts on three different levels: as content, as representational model, and as literary strategy. Although very different in their treatment of topics relating to business and economics, both novels are driven by narratives parsed with economic expression. The diverging patterns of economopoetics support central commentaries on their underlying realist aesthetics. One important finding is that, in spite of money's apparent absence from the core content of some literary texts, economic relations are inherent in the narrative structure of those texts. The book shows that economopoetics is relevant not only to any extant literature which attempts explicitly to thematize business and economics (such as Soll und Haben), but also to that which does not (such as Der Nachsommer). Economic organizing principles are pervasive signatures of the novel's aesthetic.

Nexus

Nexus
Author: William C. Donahue
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 157113963X

Biennial volume of new and innovative essays on German Jewish Studies, featuring forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish Studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 3 features special forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Renowned Heine scholar Jeffrey Sammons offers a magisterial critical retrospective on this towering "German Jewish" author, followed by a response from Ritchie Robertson, while the deanof Kraus scholarship, Edward Timms, reflects on the challenges and rewards of translating German Jewish dialect into English. Paul Reitter provides a thoughtful response. Contributors: Angela Botelho, Jay Geller, Abigail Gillman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Leo Lensing, Georg Mein, Paul Reitter, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Egon Schwarz, Edward Timms, Liliane Weissberg, Emma Woelk. William Collins Donahue is the John J. CavanaughProfessor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, TheState University of New Jersey.

Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany

Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany
Author: Katy Heady
Publisher: Camden House
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 1571134174

The effects -- both inhibitory and creative -- of the 1819-1848 censorship on German-language literary writing. In 1819, the German Confederation promulgated the infamous "Carlsbad Decrees," establishing censorship standards aimed at thwarting the political aspirations of post-Napoleonic Germany's rapidly emerging public sphere. This most comprehensive system of state censorship to that point in German lands remained in place until the revolutions of 1848, and is widely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on public discourse. However, although censorship during the period has been the object of much scholarly interest, little is known about its precise effects on literary writing. This book redresses that situation through detailed studies of six works composed and published in different parts of the Confederation by three prominent writers: Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Heinrich Heine, and Franz Grillparzer. By analyzing successive versions of these works, the study illustrates the thematic, linguistic, and aesthetic constraints censorship placed upon their writing, as well as the variety of literary evasion strategies that it stimulated. It demonstrates that while censorship inhibited and distorted German literary writing, it also led to the emergence of distinctively complex and inventive modes of literary expression that came to mark the epoch. Katy Heady received her PhD in German from the University of Sheffield in 2007.

The Art of Comedy and Social Critique in Nineteenth-century Germany

The Art of Comedy and Social Critique in Nineteenth-century Germany
Author: Rinske Van Stipriaan Pritchett
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9783039102921

During the mid-nineteenth century, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer pursued a fifty-year career as a playwright and theater manager in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at a time of the transformation of court theaters and itinerant troupes into commercial establishments staffed by middle-class professionals and subject to market forces. Although she has been undervalued by some critics past and present who considered her mainly as an adapter of contemporary novels, this study shows that with her thorough knowledge of the European dramatic tradition, her skill as a playwright, and above all her professionalism she overcame institutional and gender bias to develop a form of drama that integrated the social and economic changes of her time. The analysis focuses on her use of the subversive genre of comedy, the strategies she used to evade the censor, and her employment of assertive female and working-class characters. She revived commedia dell'arte techniques of the past while devising innovations that anticipated the subsequent course of drama as well as the film techniques of today.

Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner as Music Critics

Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner as Music Critics
Author: Tobias Taddeo Hermans
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2024-01-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 3110580357

The music reviews of Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner are central documents of 19th-century German musical culture. This book takes a closer look at the way these texts were written and explores the significant contributions Schumann and Wagner made to the discourse of musical appraisal. To that effect, the author raises fundamental questions that have thus far remained unaddressed: What textual features characterize the critical writings? How do Schumann and Wagner understand their roles as critics of music? And in what way do they reach out to the reader? Rather than understanding these critical writings exclusively as a gateway to the compositions and musical aesthetics of Schumann and Wagner, this book analyzes the texts through the lens of pragmatics, narratology and discourse analysis. Using this interdisciplinary perspective, the author proposes to understand Schumann and Wagner within the broader medial and discursive context of German ‘Kritik’. He challenges the dominant narrative that brands Schumann and Wagner as elitist Romantic critics, demonstrating instead that they actively encourage their readers to form their own judgements. This volume is an indispensable resource for scholars of German literature, periodicals and music alike.

Banned in Berlin

Banned in Berlin
Author: Gary D. Stark
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0857453114

Imperial Germany's governing elite frequently sought to censor literature that threatened established political, social, religious, and moral norms in the name of public peace, order, and security. It claimed and exercised a prerogative to intervene in literary life that was broader than that of its Western neighbors, but still not broad enough to prevent the literary community from challenging and subverting many of the social norms the state was most determined to defend. This study is the first systematic analysis in any language of state censorship of literature and theater in imperial Germany (1871-1918). To assess the role that formal state controls played in German literary and political life during this period, it examines the intent, function, contested legal basis, institutions, and everyday operations of literary censorship as well as its effectiveness and its impact on authors, publishers, and theater directors.

Censorship

Censorship
Author: Derek Jones
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 2950
Release: 2001-12-01
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1136798641

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.