Hugh Ridley – författare

This textbook series is ambitious in scope. It provides concise and lucid introductions to major works of world literature from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. It is not confined to any single literary tradition or genre, and will cumulatively form a substantial library of textbooks on some of the most important and widely read literary masterpieces. Each book is devoted to a single work and provides a close reading of that text, as well as a full account of its historical, cultural, and intellectual background, a discussion of its influence, and a guide to further reading. The contributors to the series give full consideration to the linguistic issues raised by each text, and, within the overall framework of the series, are given complete freedom in the choice of their critical method. Where the text is written in a language other than English, full account is taken of readers studying the text in English translation. While critical jargon is avoided, important technical terminology is fully explained and thus this series will be genuinely accessible to students at all levels and to general readers.

Originally published in 1983. In the late nineteenth century as the European powers divided the world between themselves and scrambled over Africa, so their writers went with them, recording in fiction, as well as in historical narrative, the events and issues of the colonial expansion. The literature which they left behind them is the subject of this book. Taking Robinson Crusoe as the starting point for colonial literature, the book looks at linking themes and ideas in the colonial literatures of England, Frances and Germany. In drawing the attention of English-speaking readers to the writing of these other countries, English fiction is placed in a wider context. The comparison also emphasises a homogeneity in the various traditions of colonial literature which goes beyond mere flag waving.

Originally published in 1983. In the late nineteenth century as the European powers divided the world between themselves and scrambled over Africa, so their writers went with them, recording in fiction, as well as in historical narrative, the events and issues of the colonial expansion. The literature which they left behind them is the subject of this book. Taking Robinson Crusoe as the starting point for colonial literature, the book looks at linking themes and ideas in the colonial literatures of England, Frances and Germany. In drawing the attention of English-speaking readers to the writing of these other countries, English fiction is placed in a wider context. The comparison also emphasises a homogeneity in the various traditions of colonial literature which goes beyond mere flag waving.

Das Werk Gottfried Benns scheint auf eine neue Lesergeneration eine gewisse Faszination auszuüben. Die Parolen der Zeit lassen sich wieder einmal durch sein Werk bestätigen. Daß es - wie schon in den fünfziger und späten sechziger Jahren - Widerstände geben kann und muß, ist verständlich. Ob die neue Rezeptionswelle aber die Konturen von Benns Werk anders auffassen wird als frühere, sollte uns beschäftigen. Diese Untersuchung will-anders als die meiste Forschung bisher - Gott­ fried Benns Werk als Gesamtwerk ernst nehmen, das heißt: Lyrik, Kunstprosa und Essayistik im (nicht nur chronologischen) Zusammenhang diskutieren. Ihr zentrales Interesse gilt noch den Gedichten; insofern bildet das Lyrik­ Kapitel den Hauptteil des Buches. Es versucht eine grundsätzliche These zu entwickeln und zu belegen: die These nämlich, daß das Werk Benns kei­ neswegs ab ovo entstanden ist, sondern als sehr bewußte Verarbeitung, Ver­ fremdung - und insofern Weiterführung - einer bestimmten Traditionslinie anzusehen ist. Hieraus ergibt sich als Arbeitsprinzip nicht nur für die frühen Gedichte eine Lektüre 'gegen den Strich', sondern eine generelle Revision der Entwicklungslinie, in der Benns Lyrik zu sehen ist. Die Gedichte der zwanzi­ ger Jahre sollen hier nicht wie schon so oft als 'Neuer Klassizismus' gefeiert, sondern als Fortführung der frühen Gedichtsammlungen - wenn auch unter verändertem, ja verkehrtem lyrischen Vorzeichen - interpretiert werden.

This book attempts for the first time a comparative literary history of Germany and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its material does not come from the familiar overlaps of individual German and American writers, but from the work of the literary historians of the two countries after 1815, when American intellectuals took Germany as a model for their project to create an American national literature. The first part of the book examines fundamental structural affinities between the two literary histories and the common problems these caused, especially in questions of canon, realism, aesthetics and in the marginalization of popular and women’s writing. In the second part, significant figures whose work straddle the two literatures – from Sealsfield and Melville, Whitman and Thomas Mann to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bellow – are discussed in detail, and the arguments of the first part are shown in their relevance to understanding major writers. This book is not merely comparative in scope: it shows that only international comparison can explain the course of American literary history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. As recent developments in American Studies explore the multi-cultural and ‘hybrid’ nature of the American tradition, this book offers evidence of the dependencies which linked American and German national literary history.

This study bridges literature and music at an exciting and controversial point, offering the lover of music and literature and the specialist reader an insight into the relationship between Wagner’s operas and the nineteenth century novel, including comparisons with Rigoletto and Der Rosenkavalier in their evolution from other forms. It discusses matters of genre and national tradition, placing Wagner’s works in the heritage of the European Enlightenment.Comparisons of Wagner’s works with the novel have been fleeting, denoting only their length and complexity. Examining in principle and in detail the proximity of Wagner’s themes and techniques to the practices of the Realist novel, this study sheds original light on major issues of Wagner’s works and on opera as genre.The book trawls extensively in two research fields. It looks to the established Wagner literature for understandings of the musical procedures which map his works onto the prose fiction, while reading Wagner’s operas against the backdrop of the European novel, rather than against German Romantic fiction. It revisits Adorno’s music sociology and his seminal study of Wagner, but repositions many elements of his argument. Unusually, this book adopts a critical stance to Nietzsche’s view of Wagner. In marked contrast to Nietzsche, the study regards parallels between Wagner and Flaubert as an enrichment of our understanding of Wagner’s achievement.The book concludes with a major question of European cultural history: why it is that – in common with Italy, but in marked contrast to France or England – Germany’s most representative works in the nineteenth century are operas rather than novels.