Christian Emden – författare

«This monograph makes an original and significant scholarly contribution, in addition to being a gripping read. Not only is it the first book in English to compare Russian and Czechoslovak literature and film of the interwar period in such a comprehensive way, but it does so via the growing discipline of the medical humanities. The book’s greatest strength is its attention to detail, exemplified by Sutton-Mattocks’s close readings of the medical implications of the creative works she selects.» (Melissa Miller, Modern Language Review 120.1, January 2025)«Her comparative approach using Czech and Russian work enriches the field by moving beyond national boundaries to show how interwar medical discourses were both locally specific and transnationally resonant. It also expands the scope of medical humanities beyond its usual Anglo-American and Western European focus, demonstrating the importance of Eastern European contributions.»(Dylan Mohr, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1-2, 2025) Surgery, bacteriology, psychiatry … medicine fascinated writers and filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s. But why did medicine capture the creative imagination at precisely that moment, and what does the prevalence of medical imagery in works of the period tell us about interwar culture? These are the questions at the heart of this book, which takes the Russian and Czech literary and cinematic contexts as case studies for interrogating the wider phenomenon.Contributing to an emerging body of scholarship bringing the Medical Humanities and Slavonic Studies into dialogue, the book focuses on four particularly prevalent medical themes in the literature and cinema of the period: syphilis, nervous illness, surgery and childbirth. It offers new perspectives on works by well-known figures of interwar Russian and Czech culture (e.g. Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgenii Zamiatin, Gustav Machatý and Vladislav Vančura) as well as familiarizing readers with more obscure works by some of their lesser-known counterparts, such as Vladimír Raffel, Vikentii Veresaev, Nikolai Aseev and Noi Galkin.

Written in response to a brutal ethnic conflict that shocked Europeans in the 1990s, post-Yugoslav literature addresses issues that are still pertinent today. Looking at questions of language, gender, memory and identity, this book sheds new light on texts by three post-Yugoslav authors writing in German: Saša Stanišić, Marica Bodrožić and the lesser-known Austrian author Alma Hadžibeganović.Drawing on sources from history, sociology, feminist theory, trauma studies and linguistics, the author argues that post-Yugoslav texts use multilingual strategies to explore the complex interplay of linguistic, ethnic, gender and sexual difference in the former Yugoslavia and to interrogate the monolingual paradigm dominant in Western Europe. She shows that post-Yugoslav literature – written in German and born out of spatial and linguistic dislocation – can open up new imaginary possibilities and point to transnational bonds that counter the acute sense of loss and speechlessness induced by trauma. The proposal for this book was the Winner of the 2018 Women in German Studies Book Prize.

This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference ‘The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500’ in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period.This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.

This is the second of three volumes based on papers given at the ‘Fragile Tradition’ conference in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the connections between cultural identity and the sense of nationhood which are to be found in literary writing, the history of ideas, and the interaction between European cultures from the late Middle Ages to the present day. It focuses particularly on the way myths of cultural identity are passed on and transformed historically; on the fashioning of various models of modern German identity with reference to the cultures of Greece, France, England and Renaissance Italy; on the reflection of 19th-century nationalism in literary writing and ideas about language; and on the ways in which cultural values have asserted themselves in relation to moments of catastrophe and abrupt political change in the 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1990s.

This is the third and final volume of papers given at the ‘Fragile Tradition’ conference in Cambridge, 2002. Together these volumes provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world in the period since 1500.This volume highlights the connections between developments in technology and scientific thought since the sixteenth century on the one hand, and the ways in which the creative imagination of literary writers has responded to those developments on the other. It focuses particularly on the changing conceptions of nature, art, and what it means to be human in the modern period, as the effects of industrial technology and biological knowledge became apparent. It also explores the impact on literary writing and the established reading culture of the new media of photography, film and telecommunication in the twentieth century.

This is the first book-length account of Joseph Conrad’s reception in Germany, a virtually unresearched area of Conrad studies. It demonstrates that Conrad was read and used by his German readers as a cosmopolitan literary and moral voice against the prevailing nationalism of Germany in the ‘dark times’ of the 1930s and 1940s, when their own voices were being silenced. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Germany remained largely indifferent to his works, this book demonstrates that, particularly after the translation of the complete fiction commencing in the 1920s, Conrad’s works achieved near cult status in Germany. On the basis of diaries and letters, contemporary reviews and essays, unpublished archival material as well as novels and films, the author illuminates the range and importance of Conrad’s presence as a powerful liberating imagination within twentieth-century German culture. Championed by Thomas Mann, lauded by Hermann Hesse, and decried as ‘Conrad the Jew’ by the Nazis, Conrad has remained an influential presence in post-war German culture. The study offers a completely fresh perspective on Conrad’s works and speaks eloquently for the importance of recognizing the way trans-national literary cultural relations have helped to shape European cultural history.

In this book the author explores the representational strategies of the modern period and their relation to political life through the story of Stanislas Leszczynski, architect king and roi bienfaisant, ‘a king that does good’. The ingredients of his story are compelling. They include: an exiled king (who makes a cameo appearance in Voltaire’s Candide and corresponds with Rousseau); a collection of writings that include aphorisms, political treatises, and a utopian novel; gardens that include a grotto of eighty-six life-size automata and an experimental village of courtiers; and architecture and landscapes that traverse the contested boundaries of central Europe, imaginary constructions of the orient, and the borderlines between fact and fiction. These come together to make a distinctive account of the transitional period in eighteenth-century culture. Stanislas’ architectural and literary works were rooted in an acceptance of the uncertainty of the world more characteristic of the story. His ‘hope of a better age’ emerges as an endeavour – through the writing and the architecture – to find one’s own meaning in history as well as a model for the good life. His story suggests a way of exploring what this struggle still entails today.

Urban living presents both challenges and opportunities for individuals and societies in their attempts to maintain and determine their cultural identity. Mobility, fragility, and inventive self-fashioning are common features of life in Europe’s big cities throughout the modern period.This volume is based on papers given at the conference ‘Imagining the City’ held in Cambridge in 2004. Together they examine the city as imagined space and as a matrix for imagined worlds, using French, German, English, Italian, Russian and North American examples. They analyse modes of literary representation of the city and literary readings of cultural politics; the impact of the imagination of artists and architects on the fashioning of urban landscapes; the effect of new technologies and media (flight, photography, film, and the internet) on urban perception; and the impact of artistic interventions and activist movements on the construction and use of public spaces in the world of today. A second volume will examine the cultural and political moulding of urban space in a similar comparative perspective.

The urban spaces we inhabit today have been moulded by a combination of historical forces – by social and economic processes, by the specific designs of urban planners, and by the regulatory and ritual practices of earlier times. As arenas of cultural activity they are also imbued with legends, symbolic associations, and historical memories.This second volume of papers arising from the conference ‘Imagining the City’, held in Cambridge in 2004, examines the physical organization and the imaginative perception of cities from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, and over a geographical range that reaches from Ukraine to Mexico. It includes discussions of the ways in which cities have been envisaged in late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in early modern times, as sites of religious, cultural and political rituals; of the uses to which urban spaces have been put by industrial societies and by the political cultures of the twentieth century; and of the implications for the populations of particular cities of the roles these have played in establishing the historical identity of particular communities (whether national, political or religious) and in the delineation of boundaries between cultures.

The relationship between different media has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in contemporary cultural and literary studies. But how should we conceive of the relationship between texts and images today? Should we speak of collaboration, interaction or competition? What is the role of literary, historical and scientific texts in a culture dominated by the visual? What is the status of images as cultural artefacts? Are images forms of representation, do they simulate reality or do they intervene in the material world? And how do literature and cultural theory – themselves essentially textual discourses – react to the much-discussed visual turn within Western culture? Does the concept of ‘intermediality’ allow literary, historical and cultural scholars to envisage a more general theory of media? Addressing these questions from a programmatic point of view, the articles in this volume investigate the effects of different forms of representation in modern European and American literature, media and thought.