Robert Vilain – författare

Hugo von Hofmannsthal became famous at the age of sixteen for poetry and lyrical drama of almost uncanny facility and beauty. Yet he ceased to write lyric poetry almost completely in the early 1900s and his fictional farewell to poetry, the so-called 'Chandos Letter', is a paradigm for the uncertainty and instability of Modernism. The verse of the 1890s, the 'lyrical decade', is generally felt to have been enhanced by his interest in the French Symbolists and the Symbolist-inspired tutelage of Stefan George. However, with analyses of verse and prose poetry from the 1890s, this book argues that Symbolism was a fundamentally inhibiting influence, ultimately responsible for the crisis in Hofmannsthal's poetic writing. 'Das Gespräch über Gedichte', written soon after 'Ein Brief', in 1903, makes it clear how the crisis was a personal one and does not imply the general impossibility of future writing, as is often suggested. As a theory of poetry, it acknowledges the importance of French Symbolism but suggests how it was ultimately a dummy aesthetic that had previously overlaid and stifled Hofmannsthal's own Romantic leanings.

'Nowhere, beloved, can world be but within us'Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, and one of the greatest twentieth-century lyric poets in German. From The Book of Hours in 1905 to the Sonnets of Orpheus written in 1922, his poetry explores themes of death, love, and loss. He strives constantly to interrogate the relationship between his art and the world around him, moving from the neo-romantic and the mystic towards the precise craft of expressing the everyday in poetry.This bilingual edition fully reflects Rilke's poetic development. It contains the full text of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, selected poems from The Book of Images, New Poems, and earlier volumes, and from the uncollected poetry 1906-26. The translations are accurate, sensitive, and nuanced, and are accompanied by an introduction and notes that elucidate Rilke's poetic practice and his central role in modern poetry. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Often regarded as the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) remains one of the most influential figures of European modernism. In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's critical contexts are explored in detail: his relationship with philosophy and the visual arts, his place within modernism and his relationship to European literature, and his reception in Europe and beyond. With its invaluable guide to further reading and a chronology of Rilke's life and work, this Companion will provide an accessible, engaging account of this extraordinary poet whose legacy looms so large today.

Often regarded as the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) remains one of the most influential figures of European modernism. In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's critical contexts are explored in detail: his relationship with philosophy and the visual arts, his place within modernism and his relationship to European literature, and his reception in Europe and beyond. With its invaluable guide to further reading and a chronology of Rilke's life and work, this Companion will provide an accessible, engaging account of this extraordinary poet whose legacy looms so large today.

In the increasingly globalised consumer culture of the twenty-first century, consumer goods have long become more than mere commodities: they are markers of identity and tools of narration. Advertising, branding and other processes of consumer culture are ubiquitous and charge objects with meaning, impacting the way we perceive them and those who wear, use, showcase or discard them. This close link between consumer culture and the narration of identities – ranging from an individual to a national level – affects the construction of «national brands», as can be seen through contemporary writing.With a focus on post-2000 Austrian literature, this book unveils how a skilful reading of consumer objects – both branded and non-branded – can enrich literary analysis. Introducing the concept of consumer literacy and applying it to Wolf Haas’ Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren, Thomas Glavinic’s Die Arbeit der Nacht, Arno Geiger’s Es geht uns gut and Raphaela Edelbauer’s Das flüssige Land, the study showcases the narrative power of consumer goods and the impact of Austrian literature and its writers on the idyllic national brand that stands in stark contrast to a troubled past.

This book examines the depiction of childhood and the Nazi German past in post-1989 German literature. Focusing on the work of W.G. Sebald, Marcel Beyer, Martin Walser and Dieter Forte, the study analyses how these authors employ tropes and myths of childhood in their engagements with Germany’s National Socialist past, including the remembrance and representation of the Holocaust, German suffering and trauma, and the National Socialist ‘everyday’. Their works are thus read as points of contact between the politics of the German past and the cultural construction of childhood.The term ‘childness’ is here modified and developed to establish a new theoretical frame of reference for literary childhood. The encounter between the adult reader and the fictional child is understood as one marked by complex and intense forms of desire, conducive to revision, mourning, nostalgia and defamiliarization. Through this framework, the study casts new light on the fictional child as a focal point of ideology and desire.

What became of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe during the Second World War? In recent years, their suffering, flight and expulsion during and after the war has attracted increasing critical attention. A wave of literary fiction has accompanied this trend, contributing to, and sometimes triggering, heated debate in the media and German-speaking society more widely. Often said to have broken a ‘taboo’, these postunification novels are in fact only the latest in a long history of literary representations of flight and expulsion in German writing. This book offers the first comprehensive account in English of ‘expulsion literature’ in West Germany from the early 1950s to present-day Germany, providing detailed readings of both canonical and lesser known texts and carefully placing the novels in their broader literary and historical context. The book demonstrates that these literary representations have often been viewed too narrowly and offers an alternative and, arguably, more positive perspective on the representation of flight and expulsion over six decades in German literature.