W. E. Yates – författare

This is the first general history in English of theatre in Vienna, the one German-speaking city which, in the eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth, sustained a theatrical life comparable to that of Paris or London. The book covers this theatrical culture from the beginnings of modern theatre in 1776 to the present day, relating it to social, political and intellectual history. It focuses primarily on the most important and productive theatres: the Burgtheater of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the commercial theatres that housed Viennese dialect comedy and operetta. Particular emphasis is placed on the dramatists and composers from whom the lasting importance of the theatres chiefly derives, and on the ideological pressures reflected in the repertory, in censorship (to which one chapter is devoted), and in press reception. The book draws on original documents including diaries, memoirs and reviews, and is accessible to general readers as well as specialists.

This 1972 text provides the student of German literature and European drama with a general introduction to Grillparzer's work. Dr Yates begins with a substantial biographical introduction which is one of the most detailed of its kind in any language. He then turns to the writings and introduces them linked by theme, identifying as Grillparzer's finest achievements the series of four dramas completed between 1823 and 1832. He also indicates the virtues characteristic of Grillparzer's work in general: the subtlety of his characterisation, his concern with moral values, the consistent ideals underlying his view of history and the human condition, and the essential theatricality of his drama. Dr Yates quotes freely; quotations from Grillparzer's prose are given in translation, those from the plays and poems are in the original with an English translation at the foot of the page. The aim throughout is to show the reader what is characteristic in the plays.

Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801-1862), for a quarter of a century the dominant actor on the popular Viennese stage, was the author of over eighty dramatic works, all but one of them comedies in the local Viennese tradition. It was only in the twentieth century that Nestroy's influence, above all as a satirist and master of language, was recognised. In this 1972 publication, the first book in English on Nestroy, Professor Yates centres his discussion of the possen (theatrical comedies) on the dominant comic elements of satire and parody, which are considered in close relation to the sources. He examines in detail five of Nestroy's best-known plays, considering them in relation to their Viennese setting and providing an introduction to the history and conditions of Viennese popular theatre from the early eighteenth century up to Nestroy's times, including an assessment of its relationship to other traditions of popular drama.

This study examines the life and works of the poet Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg (1750-1819). It begins with an analysis of Stolberg’s essays on poetic expression in relation to Romantic thinking, and the impact of his poetic style on Novalis’s early poetry. Stolberg’s aesthetic education in Italy is examined as well as his challenge to the idea that classical sculpture was always the pinnacle of beauty and that the culture of antiquity was the highest form of humanity. The detection of melancholy in Greek sculpture, which arises from the transfer of anxieties about redemption from the artist to the artefact, affected his response and detracted from the beauty of the sculpture. This view amounted to an attack on Goethe and Schiller, as it identified the issue of salvation and death as a weakness in the classical paradigm. The picture of Italy that Stolberg offered was overshadowed by a crisis of confidence in the aesthetic insights both of Winckelmann and of Lessing and was also the basis for his reception of Raphael and Michelangelo. Stolberg arrived at a response to Renaissance art and artists that marginally predates the early German Romantic worship of artists in the 1790s. The book concludes with a discussion of Stolberg’s support of Romantic politics and Romantic conversions.

The German Revolution of 1848-49 offered a significant literary opportunity for all those interested in politics in general and the progress of women in society in particular. This book explores the work of a number of women who took up the challenge of breaking into the decidedly male preserve of political writing in this period. The focus is on women with very different concerns: Malwida von Meysenbug, the aristocrat who supported the democratic cause, the assimilated Jew Fanny Lewald; the housewife, musician, composer and teacher Johanna Kinkel; and the radical feminist Louise Aston. The work examines the strategies these women employed to negotiate potentially explosive issues such as the politics of the day, class, religion and gender, as well as the way traditional images like the father-child relationship are exploited to express new thoughts. Using a combination of close textual reading and thematically based analysis the book illuminates the authors’ individual works and explores underlying issues that are common to all.

This study addresses the problems raised by the ambivalent comments about or portrayals of the Jews to be found in the writings of Gustav Freytag, Wilhelm Raabe, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Fontane and the early Thomas Mann. Why was it that these supposedly tolerant and liberal-minded men could use the language and images of antisemitism in their non-fiction and fiction? The book considers the question within the context of the unequal German-Jewish relationship in the period before, during and after Jewish emancipation. This study exposes the problematic way in which liberal-minded Germans thought about and treated the Jews in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book examines the defining trends in German politics, history and thought between the Napoleonic wars and 1848, and reflects on how they shaped the verbal and visual satire of the age.Taking issue with the idea that German satire before 1848 is too fragmented for a coherent large-scale study, the author draws widely on the spheres of literature, history and philosophy to inform his work. In particular, he focuses on the all-important notion of the world order, of what constitutes the rightful path of history and of mankind – a question with which German thought at the time was profoundly concerned. Whether clothed in the garb of orthodox theology or post-Enlightenment philosophy, various (and often conflicting) ideas as to the proper way of the world were fundamental in shaping satirical word and image in the first half of the nineteenth century.Drawing on a wide range of satirical print and polemic, the author traces these ideas through the rise and fall of Napoleon, the ideological battles of Hegelianism and Christianity, the growth of German liberalism and the evolution of Germany’s national figure, der deutsche Michel. In doing so, he throws new light on an interesting and often neglected corpus of German art and literature.The book is richly illustrated with over 100 contemporary prints, 16 of them in colour.

Louise von François (1817-1893) was a German realist writer whose work appeared in several editions during her lifetime and was translated abroad. Her most famous novel, Die letzte Reckenburgerin, attracted significant critical attention from her contemporaries and was regarded as one of the most innovative novels of the century. Her other prose fiction, however, is less well known. In the context of the ongoing re-assessment of nineteenth-century women writers, this book evaluates the thematic preoccupations and narrative technique of François’s creative work as a whole. Through a study of ten representative texts, most of which have not been subject to detailed literary analysis in the past, the author considers François’s powerful portrayals of female self-reliance, and seeks to elucidate aspects of her most cherished convictions, which centred on values of honour and duty, and on a vision of a more equitable and decent society.