European Studies in English Literature – serie

The mystery plays of medieval England have traditionally been analysed in ways which centre on the texts and their religious significance. Hans-Jurgen Diller's major study, first published in German, seeks to recover their dramatic potential by focusing on the function of language in conventional modes of speech, prayer, address and dialogue. He looks at speech and dramatic form in the plays to reveal new insights concerning spatial and temporal orientation, the expression of emotions, and the relationships between characters on stage, between actor and audience, and between the dramatic world and the ordinary world outside it. His analysis offers new ways of understanding the relationship of vernacular drama to its liturgical antecedents, and new means of distinguishing stylistically between the cycles and between the groups of plays they comprise.

Hermann Fischer's lively and original 1991 study of Romantic verse narrative traces in comprehensive detail the origins and development of this poetic form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It brings together the longer epic verse tales of Scott, Byron and Southey and the more lyrical forms of Romantic narrative poetry, thus presenting familiar poems such as Shelley's 'Alastor' and Keats's 'The Eve of St Agnes' in the revealing but neglected context of the genre and its history. Professor Fischer addresses the question of genre from a viewpoint that is both theoretical and historical, and his study also proves illuminating in many areas of Romantic literature, covering issues such as the role of the medieval revival and the decline of neoclassicism, the relative importance of popular and more literary sources, and questions of changing taste and the reading public. This translation, extensively revised and updated, makes Hermann Fischer's acclaimed study available for the first time in English.

Mock-heroic poetry is one of the most characteristic genres of English neoclassicism in the eighteenth century. Derived from French models, the mock-heroic became something more than merely a parody of the serious epic: relieved of its gravity, it was nevertheless a legitimate and independent form of epic poetry. This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions and the history of the mock-heroic genre. In the first part, Ulrich Broich shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses - epic, comedy, parody, satire and occasional poetry. The 'polyphonic' genre which emerges from this analysis stands in ironic contrast to the neoclassical ideal of decorum in a harmonious unity of discourse and form. The second part traces the history of mock-heroic poetry: its foreign sources, its beginnings in England, the 'rivalry' with other forms of comic narrative, and its decline in the second half of the eighteenth century.

This major and acclaimed study of the symbolist tradition in England focuses on the years 1850 to 1900 and discusses the poetry of such as William Morris, O'Shaughnessy, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Wilde and Yeats, paintings by Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, and critical works by Keble, Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold, Pater and Arthur Symons. This volume considers the changes from romantic symbol through Victorian 'type' and 'emblem' to late romantic image. This study of both literature and the visual arts is comparative in nature, attempting to establish an English symbolist tradition as part of an international development linking the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally published by Cambridge in 1988, Lother Hönnighausen's book includes illustrations and a survey of critical works, defining major research issues and offering suggestions for other work.

Dickens' plots have often been dismissed as conventional or cheaply sensational: Anny Sadrin argues that they should rather be seen as the embodiment of one of Dickens's central preoccupations: dramatised rituals of succession. Through readings of individual texts Professor Sadrin shows how the simple pattern of quest for father which characterises Oliver Twist develops in Dickens's later novels into an extended exploration of the triple inheritance of looks, name and property. Increasing intricacies of plot represent growing tension between conflicting forces in the parent-child relationship: the wish to belong and the wish to break free, the quest for identity and the fear of shameful identification, the filial piety of Telemachus and the patricidal yearnings of Oedipus. Throughout, Dickens is using plot to account for the complex process of reinstatement and revaluation which enables rightful heirs to take their rightful place in the family and society.

Originally published in English in 1989, from a 1980 German edition, this book provides a comprehensive study of Oscar Wilde's work. It aims to gain fresh insight into his literary and critical œuvre by fully analysing each of his works on the basis of a textually oriented interpretation, taking equal account of the biographical and intellectual contexts. Professor Kohl's starting-point is the thesis that Wilde's identity - both personal and artistic - can only be adequately described in terms of a conflict between two opposing forces: individualism and convention. This conflict colours not only Wilde's use of Romantic and Victorian images and motifs, but also his modern portrayal of the individual's alienation from society, the loss of transcendent values, the sovereignty of subjectivity and autonomous art, and also his formal experiments with language. This is a penetrating and highly readable account of Wilde as a 'conformist rebel'.

Originally published in German in 1981, and first published in English as this Cambridge edition in 1990, Natascha Würzbach's study of the street ballad was the first to investigate a specific genre of popular literature which had previously been vastly neglected. Attention is focused on the social and cultural conditions which accompanied its development. The contemporary reputation of the street ballad is examined, as is the importance of the genre for the history of ideas. It is also looked at as a literary form. In the period from 1550 to 1650 the street ballad was a widespread and well-known type of ephemeral literature which met the literary needs of the middle and lower classes. It decisively influenced the subsequent development of the ballad as a medium of entertainment and instruction, and such diverse forms as the popular songs and political ballads of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The image of the 'fallen woman' was a common one in Elizabethan literature. This 1990 study, translated from the original German by the author, deals with an unconventional aspect of the motif; the genre of 'complaint' in which writers enabled women to put their own case, bewailing their fate, invoking pity, and stressing private rather than public virtues. The book begins with a group of Elizabethan poems in which women lament their unfortunate lives. It goes on to deal with a range of works, tracing the complaint from classical models such as Ovid's Heroical Epistles to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Shakespeare's Lucrece. However, Dr Schmitz shows that the mode is not confined to historical tales, nor to the early or early modern periods. In Elizabethan times it occurs in novellas and meditations and can be seen as the inspiration for eighteenth-century Roxanas and the nineteenth-century Magdalen.

Wolfgang Iser's study of Walter Pater (1839-94) was first published in German in 1960. It places the English critic, essayist and novelist in a philosophical tradition whose major exponents were Hegel and Coleridge, at the same time showing how Pater differed crucially from these thinkers to become representative of a late Victorian culture critically poised in transition between Romanticism and Modernism. Pater's new definitions of 'beauty' and 'style' in art, his doctrine of 'art for art's sake', his preoccupation with aesthetic existence, his fascination with periods of balance and historical transition are seen in the light of his scepticism towards all systematisation and his view of art as countering human finiteness by capturing the intensity of the moment. This important book, which remains as illuminating now as when it first appeared, will interest those interested in philosophy and aesthetics and Pater specialists alike.

Hermann Fischer's lively and original 1991 study of Romantic verse narrative traces in comprehensive detail the origins and development of this poetic form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It brings together the longer epic verse tales of Scott, Byron and Southey and the more lyrical forms of Romantic narrative poetry, thus presenting familiar poems such as Shelley's 'Alastor' and Keats's 'The Eve of St Agnes' in the revealing but neglected context of the genre and its history. Professor Fischer addresses the question of genre from a viewpoint that is both theoretical and historical, and his study also proves illuminating in many areas of Romantic literature, covering issues such as the role of the medieval revival and the decline of neoclassicism, the relative importance of popular and more literary sources, and questions of changing taste and the reading public. This translation, extensively revised and updated, makes Hermann Fischer's acclaimed study available for the first time in English.

Mock-heroic poetry is one of the most characteristic genres of English neoclassicism in the eighteenth century. Derived from French models, the mock-heroic became something more than merely a parody of the serious epic: relieved of its gravity, it was nevertheless a legitimate and independent form of epic poetry. This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions and the history of the mock-heroic genre. In the first part, Ulrich Broich shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses - epic, comedy, parody, satire and occasional poetry. The 'polyphonic' genre which emerges from this analysis stands in ironic contrast to the neoclassical ideal of decorum in a harmonious unity of discourse and form. The second part traces the history of mock-heroic poetry: its foreign sources, its beginnings in England, the 'rivalry' with other forms of comic narrative, and its decline in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The mystery plays of medieval England have traditionally been analysed in ways which centre on the texts and their religious significance. Hans-Jurgen Diller's major study, first published in German, seeks to recover their dramatic potential by focusing on the function of language in conventional modes of speech, prayer, address and dialogue. He looks at speech and dramatic form in the plays to reveal new insights concerning spatial and temporal orientation, the expression of emotions, and the relationships between characters on stage, between actor and audience, and between the dramatic world and the ordinary world outside it. His analysis offers new ways of understanding the relationship of vernacular drama to its liturgical antecedents, and new means of distinguishing stylistically between the cycles and between the groups of plays they comprise.

Manfred Pfister's book is the first to provide a coherent and comprehensive framework for the analysis of plays in all their dramatic and theatrical dimensions. The materical on which his analysis is based covers all genres and periods of drama, from Greek tragedy and comedy to the contemporary theatre, with the plays of Shakespeare providing a special focus. His approach is not historical but systematic, combining more abstract categorisations with detailed and concrete interpretations of specific sample texts. An extensive international bibliography of relevant theatre and drama studies further enhances the practical value of the book.