Companion to the Works of Heinrich von Kleist

BERND FISCHER is Emeritus Academy Professor at the Ohio State University. BERND FISCHER is Emeritus Academy Professor at the Ohio State University. HELMUT J. SCHNEIDER is Professor (emeritus) für neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Bonn. He has also held positions at the University of California, Irvine und Davis. He has published widely on German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the European pastoral tradition, utopian landscapes, the literature of the Enlightenment and on German neoclassicism (in particular on Lessing, Kleist, Goethe). His most recent monograph is Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2011). JEFFREY L. SAMMONS is Professor Emeritus, Yale University SEÁN ALLAN is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at the Humboldt Universität in what was then East Berlin. From 2001-2016 he worked at the University of Warwick before moving to St Andrews in 2016 as Professor of German. His main research areas regard the culture of the European Enlightenment, interdisciplinary approaches to the mediation of music and the visual arts, as well as translation and translation studies. He is the author of The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (1996) and The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Camden House, 2001). He is the co-editor of a special edition of German Life and Letters, entitled Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity (2011); the co-editor of the volumes Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics and Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2012), and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (2016); and the co-author of the monograph Unverhoffte Wirkungen: Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2014). His most recent book, Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (2019), investigates questions of intermediality and spans not only film, but also literature, music, and the visual arts in post-war cinema.

This volume... succeeds in providing insight into the rich complexity of Kleist's writings and ... bears testimony to the continued relevance of his oeuvre today.

• Introduction: Heinrich von Kleist's Life and Work - Bernd FischerJupiterists and Alkemists: Amphitryon as an Example of How Kleist's Texts Read Interpreters - Jeffery L. SammonsKleist's Penthesilea: Battleground of Gendered Discourses - Jost HermandOn Structures in Kleist - Anthony Stephens--til 7/03Strange News: Kleist's Novellas - Bianca TheisenThe Eye of the Beholder: Kleist's Visual Poetics of Knowledge - Hinrich C. SeebaThe Performative Turn of the Beautiful: "Free Play" of Language and the "Unspeakable Person" - Bernhard GreinerThe Facts of Life: Kleist's Challenge to Enlightenment Humanism (Lessing) - Helmut J. Schneider"Betwixt a false reason and none at all": Kleist, Hume, Kant, and the "Thing in Itself" - Tim MehiganChanging Color: Kleist's "Die Verlobung in St. Domingo" and the Discourses of Miscegenation - Susanne Zantop-DeceasedRipe Moments and False Climaxes: Thematic and Dramatic Configurations of the Theme of Death in Kleist's Works - "Mein ist die Rache spricht der Herr": Violence and Revenge in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist - Sean Allan