David Constantine - Böcker

The eight stories in this volume offer a varied and representative collection of twentieth century German authors from a range of political and cultural backgrounds. Styles include the non-fictional manner of Kluge's montage technique and the contrasting classical storytelling of Penzoldt.With reading notes and parallel texts in German and English, this anthology is valuable to the German student of English as well as the English student of German. Reflecting trends in German literature, the stories have been selected for their quality as well as their readability, and will enhance the appreciation of both languages.

This new critical biography of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is the first to appear for more than fifty years. In this time his status as one of the greatest European poets has become increasingly apparent - yet he is commonly considered a 'difficult' poet. A prime aim of this book is to make Hölderlin more accessible to the English-speaking reader. This comprehensive discussion of Hölderlin's work includes close readings of many individual poems, with English translations of all quotations. The author, who is also concerned to locate Hölderlin constantly in his times, recounts in a chronological framework the main line of the poet's life, his dealings with his important contemporaries, his love for Susette Gontard, and the long years of loneliness and frustration.Hölderlin is an archetypal figure, exciting fear and pity, a poet whose religion was founded on the conviction that his gods were absent, and whose modernity lies in his experience of absence.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.In this fascinating addition to the Literary Agenda series, David Constantine argues that poetry matters. It matters for individuals and for the society they are members of. He asserts that poetry is not for the few but for the many, and belongs and can only thrive among them, speaks of and to their concerns. Poetry considers both the writing and the reading of poetry, which Constantine views as kindred activities. He examines what goes into the writing of a poem and considers what good there is in reading it. Constantine also considers translation, arguing that great benefit comes to the native language from dealings with the foreign; also, that all reading is a form of translation - of texts into the lives we lead. Altogether, Poetry is an attempt, with many quotations, to show how poetry works, what its responsibilities are, and how it may help us in our real circumstances now.

The latest volume in Methuen's Collected Brecht includes two plays previously untranslated into English Volume 8 of Brecht's collected plays contains his last completed plays, from the eight years between his return from America to Europe after the war and his death in 1956. Brecht's ANTIGONE (1948) is a bold adaptation of Holderlin's classic German translation of Sophocles' play. A reflection on resistance and dictatorship in the aftermath of Nazism, it was a radical new experiment in epic theatre. THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE (1949) is a semi-documentary account of the Paris Commune, and Brecht's most serious and ambitious historical play. TURANDOT is Brecht's version of the classic Chinese story is a satire on the intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic, Nazi bureaucracy, and other targets.