David Robin Midgley – författare

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.