George C. Schoolfield – författare

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a common mind-set emerged among many intellectuals—“la décadence.” Many novels and novellas of the period were populated with protagonists who were fragile, refined, self-absorbed, and preoccupied with a trivially exquisite aesthetic. A Baedeker of Decadence presents thirty-two international works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon.Schoolfield tracks down the symptoms of decadence in narrative works written in more than a dozen languages, providing synopses and passages in English translation to give a sense of each author’s style and tone. Schoolfield throws new light on the close intellectual kinship of authors from August Strindberg to Bram Stoker to Thomas Mann, and on the ingredients, themes, motifs, and preconceptions that characterized decadent literature.

The poems of Elmer Diktonius place him in the forefront of literary expressionism. His idylls and his novel give him high rank among Northern Europe's greatest literary innovators in the twentieth century. He has an unusual drama because of his ambiguous involvement with the politics of the left and his hesitation between internationalism and a deep Finnish patriotism. George C. Schoolfield provides the uninitated reader with a biographical and critical overview of Diktonius's life and work and calls attention to his artistic triumphs, defeats, and contradictions.

The literature of Finland is bilingual, with lively and extensive traditions in both Finnish and Swedish. This history covers both literary traditions in detail. The volume's first section, on Finnish-language literature, consists of a series of connected chapters by leading authorities within the field. It opens with a consideration of the folk literature in Finnish that flourished during the Middle Ages and then examines the more recent history of Finnish-language literature, with special emphasis placed on writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second part of the book provides an examination of Finland's Swedish-language literature from the late fifteenth century through the early nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters trace developments in Finland's Swedish-language literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.A survey of children's literature—from both the Finnish- and Swedish-language traditions—concludes this exceptionally thorough volume.

This survey of the literary treatment of musicians in German novels and novellas begins with the Romantics and ends with the publication of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. Schoolfield explores the work of a large selection of writers, including Hoffmann, Tieck, Kleist, Brentano, Grillparzer, Werfel and Hesse among many others. Through these works he tracks the progression of the figure of the musician as professional, artist, genius, composer, and pedagogue and how the pursuit of their art is interpreted by major literary movements.

Here are verse translations, with original texts on facing pages, of representative lyrics by ninety-nine poets of the German Baroque. At its original publication, this volume by Schoolfield presented many of the poets to an English-speaking audience for the first time. An extensive introduction discusses the Baroque culture of the German-language realm and brief biographies of the poets conclude the volume.

Foreword by George C. Schoolfield

These essays discuss approaches to early modern literature in central Europe, focusing on four pivotal areas: connections between humanism and the new scientific thought; the relationship of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature to ancient and Renaissance European traditions; the social and political context of early modern writing; and the poets' self-consciousness about their work.As a whole, the volume argues that early modern writing in central Europe should not be viewed solely as literature but as the textual product of specific social, political, educational, religious, and economic circumstances.The contributors are Judith P. Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Thomas W. Best, Dieter Breuer, Barton W. Browning, Gerald Gillespie, Anthony Grafton, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Uwe-K. Ketelsen, Joseph Leighton, Ulrich Mache, Michael M. Metzger, James A. Parente, Jr., Richard Erich Schade, George C. Schoolfield, Peter Skrine, and Ferdinand van Ingen.

Sixteen of his former colleagues and students join in this volume in honoring Walter Silz. Concentrating on a single theme-the German drama-this volume contains essays and interpretations of plays ranging from Hrotsvit von Gandersheim to Bertolt Brecht. Eight of the sixteen essays deal with dramas from the area of Silz's main concentration-the nineteenth century. Also included are a tribute to Silz and a bibliography of his writings.

A look at neglected aspects of the early career of one of the premier poets of the German language.Although Rainer Maria Rilke and his work have been much studied and written about over the past century -- as befits the perhaps most important German-language poet of modern times -- certain aspects of his early life and career have been neglected or are in need of a fresh look. Accordingly, this book investigates Rilke's life and career from adolescence until the verge of thirty. Here the reader finds the hysterical, harried tutee clinging to Valerie vonRhonfeld; the clever, supercilious, and anxious stroller through Prague of Larenopfer; the narcissistic diarist preening for Lou Andreas-Salomé in Italy and elsewhere; the priggishly high-minded but lethal reviewer of German-language literature; the devoted but delusional presenter of Nordic letters. A final section focuses on thirteen poems or poem clusters composed between 1892 and 1900 and mostly left untouched by Rilke scholarship. While depending heavily on the evidence of the texts themselves, the present author allows himself to conjecture about, for instance, the traces left by the boy's hasty training in Latin; his knowledge -- or ignorance -- of Czech national opera and popular literature; the genesis of some willfully "decadent" poems; his odd literary likes and dislikes; and so on. From this "Wirrnis" (confusion, muddle; one of his favorite words), the young Rilke emerges as a dogged self-educator, and, for all his laments and insecurities and languorous poses, a figure of distinction, gifted with an almost preternatural verbal inventiveness and recondite energy.George C. Schoolfield is Emeritus Professor of German and Scandinavian Literature at Yale.