Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature – serie

Frequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for Spring Awakening and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds. This lesson in radical perspectivism and constructivism is a key to Wedekind’s practice as a playwright, and it links the Munich dramatist’s work to the thought of Schopenhauer, who first used the term Elastizität in a philosophical sense; Darwin, who considered adaptability to be a primordial characteristic of life; Nietzsche, whose commentary on acrobats in Also sprach Zarathustra announces the Overman; and Freud, who used the term to describe the reactive, conservative nature of the instincts. Taking Elastizität and the modern notion of adaptability as its point of departure, this book explores Wedekind’s construction of space, movement and character in his plays, pantomimes, ballets and theoretical writings as a means of understanding both the structural consistencies and the ideological incongruities that permeate his fiction and nearly all layers of his works. This work also disengages Wedekind from traditional discussions of the dramatist as controversial social critic and reintroduces him into more productive discussions of his connection to nineteenth-century philosophical debates surrounding determinism, dualism and perception, on the one hand, and modern notions of risk, danger and precarity on the other.

Folklore provides a metaphor for insecurity in British women’s writing published between 1750 and 1880. When characters feel uneasy about separations between races, classes, or sexes, they speak of mermaids and «Cinderella» to make threatening women unreal and thus harmless. Because supernatural creatures change constantly, a name or story from folklore merely reinforces fears about empire, labor, and desire. To illustrate these fascinating rhetorical strategies, this book explores works by Sarah Fielding, Ann Radcliffe, Sydney Owenson, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Anne Thackeray, and Jean Ingelow, pushing our understanding of allusions to folktales, fairy tales, and myths beyond «happily ever after.»

During the interwar period America and Russia provided German travel writers with opposing visions of Germany’s future, as well as blank screens for the projections of their hopes and anxieties. The travel literature genre allowed authors and readers to approach Weimar Germany’s social issues from a psychologically safe distance. This is the first book to analyze the American and Russian travels of Kisch, Toller, Holitscher, Goldschmidt, and Rundt from a psychogeographic and imagologic perspective. It is a work of particular interest to researchers and students of travel literature, cultural studies, the construction and perception of the «other,» and literary psychology.

Islands, both literal and figurative, recur in fiction authored by many prominent Canadian women writers. Using a critical lens based on Northrop Frye and Julia Kristeva, this book closely examines fourteen novels by eight twentieth-century authors, emphasizing works by L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood. Several of the novels, such as Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Laurence’s A Jest of God and The Diviners, Atwood’s Surfacing and Bodily Harm, Alice Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women, and Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute, are among Canada’s most well-known. Some of the works discussed present the island as a redemptive retreat, but in most cases the island’s role is ambiguous, ranging from a temporary respite from life’s pressures to a nightmarish trap.

Images and Imagery: Frames, Borders, Limits – Interdisciplinary Perspectives is a collection of essays by scholars from around the world exploring the complex interactions between literary texts and visual images (in the form of paintings, photographs, and films). Giving coherence to these wide-ranging contributions is the theme of frames, borders, and limits. The eighteen authors, each from a particular point of view, examine works that reach beyond the limits, both cognitive and expressive, of any single mode of expression.

Fanny Lewald: Between Rebellion and Renunciation provides the first comprehensive account in English of the life and work of Fanny Lewald (1811-1889), tracing the way she positioned herself – sometimes precariously – between rebellion and renunciation. All genres are considered: novels and stories, autobiography, travel literature, essays, diaries, and letters. Widely recognized as one of the early German advocates of women’s right to education and work, this study places Lewald’s views on these issues in a broadly comparative cultural context. This book will, therefore, be of interest not only to specialists in German literature, but also to students and scholars of European cultural and social history, Jewish studies, and women’s studies.

Canonical but controversial works of radical modernism, John Dos Passos’ novels continue to intrigue readers and challenge literary critics with their unique styles and provocative messages. This book offers an insightful and refreshing perspective on his fictional world, exploring the historical vision and utopian aspirations of his early novels in light of their dialectical politics in narrating modern American society. History and Utopian Disillusion convincingly shows that Dos Passos’ epic-scale project is a radical hymn of faith dialectically inspiring the utopian resolution of American history by presenting entropic despair and disillusionment.

This collection of eighteen essays explores the meanings and depictions of beauty and the abject in art (from Renaissance portraiture to the canvasses of Salvador Dali); photography and the representation of the body; film (from the horror genre and gay/lesbian sexuality to socio-political problems); literature (from classical lyric and pastoral drama to the contemporary verbal arts); cultural studies (from the femme fatale and James Bond to vampires and monsters); architecture; and linguistics. These essays not only examine the theme from a variety of media and critical perspectives, they also scrutinize and challenge traditional notions of beauty and the abject.

Love and Death in Lawrence and Foucault is the first full-length study of Foucault and the Foucaultians not to look at them from a quasi-hagiographical perspective. The Lawrentian point of view employed here to deal with Foucault and his oeuvre is utterly unique, imaginative, and efficacious in explicating/demystifying Foucaultian theory, while at the same time promoting Barry J. Scherr’s courageous, indefatigable project of «restoring» D. H. Lawrence to his rightfully and supremely high place in the pantheon of great British literature. Rebellious and unconventional yet scholarly and mature, Love and Death in Lawrence and Foucault is the bravest and most unorthodox study of Foucault to date. It is a worthy addition to Scherr’s previous literary-cultural studies, D. H. Lawrence Today and D. H. Lawrence’s Response to Plato. A supremely lively, incisive, lucid, and profound critique, Love and Death in Lawrence and Foucault is indispensable to students and scholars of Lawrence and Foucault alike.

Both the alliterative Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy (c. 1400) and the Laud Troy Book (c. 1400), a metrical romance, deal with the lives and feats of chivalric heroes and place special emphasis on the psychological effects of love. This book is a study of the motifs in John Clerk’s and the Laud-poet’s narratives and of their characterization of the Trojan War’s principal actors. Both writers used the same source, but their preferences for motifs and their attitudes toward the persons involved were often quite different. Thirteen illustrations, mainly from medieval Guido manuscripts, serve as a stimulus to those who want to know more about the medieval understanding of the Trojan War.

Focusing on specimens of discourse where criticism assumes a flagrantly bucolic persona, Archeologies of Invective investigates hitherto little acknowledged contexts of irony, aggressivity, and vilification. After considering briefly Lucilius and Horace, the author evaluates such diverse figures as Poggio Bracciolini, Quevedo, Dunbar, Poe, and Mencken before proceeding to sustained discussion of Goethe’s Italian Journey, Werther, and the «Invektiven.» In terms of prime-time satiric virtuosity, Byron’s Don Juan recycles pastoral animus, acting as a rogue-like mirror-text of the Schiller/Goethe Xenien of the late 1790s. Sidney’s double sestina and Villon’s «Ballad of the Women of Paris» are seen inaugurating the modern age, while, at the dawn of the avant-garde, Verlaine’s «Invectives» sample Goethean and Villonesque attitude at a new level of recherché «vulgarity.» Low- and Highbrow, outlaw and Philistine resurface in Wyndham Lewis’s Arcadian perspective on the artist-intellectual. Poets Robert Frost and Theodore Enslin are seen reinvigoratoring the edgily «agrest» scene of invective in America. Archeologies of Invective situates itself also with respect to a psychohistorical terrain – altered states of consciousness reflecting Faustian transition: the dislocation of the peasant class, the empowerment of women as a heterological «state within a state,» the advent of modern weaponry, and the rise of alcohol – whose genealogy becomes nothing short of a «gin-eology.» Stable notions of character give way to impersonal, pantomimic terms of art, such as caliber; the hero is displaced by the wanderer, thief, madman, and clown. Not limiting itself to the literary canon, Archeologies includes analyses of gangster films and sports legends in the context of Arcadian motivation. Finally, Eisenhauer places Philip Roth’s American Pastoral within the arc of 19th-century pastoral fiction, locating a prosaic «Nowadays» in which criticism is still inscribed, as evidenced by Fish’s explication of pastoral in the context of professional correctness.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays advances the study of anagnorisis («recognition»), a quintessential concept in Aristotelian poetics. This book explores narrative structure and epistemology by examining how anagnorisis works in narrative fiction, music, and film. Contributors hail from the fields of cinema; opera; religion; medieval and modern English, German, and French literatures; comparative literature; and Indian (Sanskrit) and Islamic (Arabic) literatures, both classical and modern.

Antigone’s Daughters presents various readings of the classical myth of Antigone as interpreted through modern feminist and psychoanalytic literary theories. Topics such as femininity, education, and establishing selfhood amidst the restrictions of the patriarchal society presented by Sophocles provide the foundation for the modern novel. This study serves as a model for the comparative interpretation of literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including the writings of George Sand (Indiana), Karolina Pavlova (A Double Life), Nikolai Chernyshevsky (What Is to Be Done?), Emile Zola (L’Assommoir and Nana), María Luisa Bombal (La amortajada) and Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits). Each chapter isolates an aspect of Antigone’s struggle within both the public and domestic spheres as she negotiates her independence and asserts her voice. A valuable tool for the study of modern literature, the universality of Antigone presented in this study prompts the investigation of many classical motifs while providing a thorough study of various national literatures within their own contemporary contexts.

After Romanticism explores the ground common to European romanticism and American modernism, a space of translation and echoing where gulfs of ironic difference open between islands of topographic similarity, where literary history is subject to fictive renegotiation. Robert Eisenhauer situates Truman Capote’s texts within the artistic/philosophical orbit of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, at the same time reading Answered Prayers as a validation of Baroque mysticism, a revisiting of controversies surrounding Lucinde, and a modernist take on Shelley’s Triumph of Life. In the second essay, the author unpacks the signifiers Cristal and crystal, assessing their role in the rhetoric of metahistory. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is seen embodying the exotic «trans» underlying representation itself, the disappointed searching of Schiller’s sentimental consciousness. Discussing two cinematic interpretations of Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version, Eisenhauer traces the use/abuse of names in the rhetoric of academic and political vilification. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aeschylus, Browning, Golding, and Adorno, he finds the current state of discourse in need of «heavy teaching», so that the repressed subject of democracy/tyranny can surpass the psychopathology of the Same.Analyzing Fellini’s radical revision of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, the author suggests how inscrutability saves the audience from guilt because the viewer cannot arrive at apodictic certainty concerning the «subject screened». While Poe lampoons «the transcendentals» as a kind of disease, implying readerly guilt by association, and solidifying the letter, Fellini, by valorizing theatrical illusion, fails to translate a text that teaches the reader more than he or she is prepared to know. After Romanticism concludes with an imaginary conversation (echoing the pedagogical dynamic of Henry James’s «The Pupil») in which a still problematic «translation» of a poetic text by the arch-modernist Gertrude Stein is discussed.

The essays in Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’œil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives investigate the subject of deception and falsehood from various perspectives. Classical, modernist and postmodern texts and art forms, both visual and performative, are examined in frames of reference that range from aesthetics and literary theory to cognitive science. In some cases, deception and falsehood are seen to have positive connotations, and, in other cases, their negative dimensions are highlighted. The complexity of these terms and their relationship with truth and truthfulness are put on display by the contributors to this volume.

This collection of insightful and provocative essays explores the theme of sanctuaries of light in nineteenth-century European literature, especially in selected works by William Wordsworth, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, and Charlotte Brontë. These sanctuaries of light, natural beauty, and serenity comfort, nurture, and revitalize the heart, mind, and soul of the individual and inspire creative expression.This book will be of interest to professors, teachers, and scholars in the fields of English literature, German literature, European literature, comparative literature, and cultural studies.

The twenty-four essays in Rewriting Texts Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives examine the complex relationships between original creative works and subsequent versions of these originals, from both theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. The process involves the rereading, reinterpretation, and rediscovery of literary texts, paintings, photographs, and films, as well as the consideration of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, transcodification, ekphrasis, parody, translation, and revision. The interdisciplinary analyses consider works from classical antiquity to the present day, in a number of literatures, and include such topics as the reuse and resemantization of photographs and iconic images.

Youth at War: Feldpost Letters of a German Boy to His Parents, 1943-1945 is a bilingual (German and English), annotated edition of a large collection of Feldpost letters and postcards written by a German boy between September 1943 and February 1945. Born in 1927, Gerhard G. was one of Germany’s youngest soldiers during the Second World War. He was only fifteen years old when in September 1943 he became a student (Luftwaffenhelfer) in the German Flak, an anti-aircraft gun unit that defended Germany against frequent aerial attacks by the Allied Forces. In July 1944, he was drafted into the R.A.D., a compulsory national labor service for young men and women. Finally, in October 1944, Gerhard joined the German navy (Kriegsmarine), where he served on the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer from January to March 1945. In May 1945, at the age of seventeen, he became an American prisoner of war. Due to his young age, he was released and permitted to return home in August 1945. This collection of one hundred and forty letters and postcards he had mailed to his parents was found in his house, shortly before his death in May 2008, neatly tied together by a string and in chronological order. It represents the large majority, if not all of the correspondence to his family that reached them while he was away from home. Gerhard’s letters give deep insight into many aspects of military and social life during the Second World War, while offering the reader a rare and close look at the war experiences, thoughts, and feelings of an intelligent German boy who, from one day to the next, was made a part of Hitler’s war machine. In combination with photographs and other documents from his childhood, youth, and young adulthood, these letters help reconstruct an interesting piece of German Alltagsgeschichte and can perhaps shed new light on a much-discussed time in German history. The edition, which includes a historical and biographical introduction, is not only a valuable source for scholars and students in various disciplines, but also addresses general readers with an interest in the social history of the Second World War.

Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home presents comparative domestic biographies of four American Realist writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Drawing upon extensive primary sources to reconstruct the authors’ private lives, Domestic Biographies illuminates how they lived when no one was looking. In particular this book examines how the authors worked and wrote at home and how their home life in turn made its way into their novels and non-fiction. Domestic Biographies offers an innovative and exciting architectural and domestic lens through which to study the lives and literature of America’s best-known Realists.

This book is a collection of wonderful and thoughtful essays that explore the theme of beautiful sanctuaries in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European literature. The book focuses especially on selected works by Percy Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, and James Hilton. These sanctuaries of light, natural beauty, and tranquility comfort, nurture, and soothe the heart, mind, and soul of the individual, and inspire creative expression.

Africana Women Writers: Performing Diaspora, Staging Healing focuses on contemporary literary works, plays in particular, written after 1976 by Africana women writers. From a cross-cultural, transnational perspective, the author examines how these women writers – emanating from Cameroon (Nicole Werewere Liking), Britain (Winsome Pinnock), Guadeloupe (Maryse Condé and Simone Schwartz-Bart), Nigeria (Tess Onwueme), and the United States (Ntozake Shange) – move beyond static, conventional notions regarding blackness and being female and reconfigure newer identities and spaces to thrive. DeLinda Marzette explores the numerous ways these women writers create black female agency and vital, energizing communities. Contextually, she uses the term diaspora to refer to the mass dispersal of peoples from their homelands – herein Africa – to other global locations; objects of diasporic dispersal, these individuals then become a kind of migrant, physically and psychologically. Each author shares a diasporic heritage; hence, much of their subjects, settings, and themes express diaspora consciousness. Marzette explores who these women are, how they define themselves, how they convey and experience their worlds, how they broach, loosen, and explode the multiple yokes of race, class, and gender-based oppression and exploitation in their works. What is fostered, encouraged, shunned, ignored – the spoken, the unspoken and, perhaps, the unspeakable – are all issues of critical exploration. Ultimately, all the women of this study depend on female bonds for survival, enrichment, healing, and hope. The plays by these women are especially important in that they add a diverse dimension to the standard dramatic canon.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), perhaps the most famous European poet of the twentieth century, exemplifies how the «crisis of language» inherent in literary Modernism also constitutes a crisis of religious discourse. In Rilke’s poetry and prose, language replaces God as the focal point of human experience. Yet despite his rejection of Christianity, Rilke crucially draws on Christian imagery to express his Modernist worldview. Transformation of Language and Religion in Rainer Maria Rilke offers new readings of major texts such as The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and The Duino Elegies, as well as analyzing some of Rilke’s lesser-known works, Visions of Christ and «The Letter of the Young Worker.»

Cemetery Plots from Victoria to Verdun considers the rhetoric of burial reform, cemeterial customs, and epitaphic writing in Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century through the Great War. The first half of the book studies mid- and late-Victorian responses to death and burial, including epitaph collections, burial reform documents, and fictional representations of burial and epitaph writing, especially in the novels of Charles Dickens. The second half studies the same discourse of burial, mourning, and epitaphs in select fiction, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, and poems produced in response to World War I in order to understand how writing about individual memorialization changed in post-war British literature and culture.

Body Language: Corporeality, Subjectivity, and Language in Johann Georg Hamann addresses the centrality of sensual perception to the constitution of subjectivity and the resulting relationship between subjectivity and language in the work of Johann Georg Hamann. In positing the body as the entity that conditions a subject’s encounter with the world, Hamann, it is argued, prefigures a notion of finite subjectivity that not only runs counter to the Enlightenment tradition but also reemerges in nineteenth- (Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) and twentieth-century (Benjamin) discourses on the tension between subjectivity and the abstraction of language. The paradox at the heart of this investigation is Hamann’s radical circumscription of reason as expressed through language, which nevertheless attempts to recuperate the concept of universal meaning through faith. Language is wrested away from abstraction and, therefore, any universality, and becomes the expression of the finite, corporeal subjectivity, a state of limitation that is at once granted and resolved by a divine creator.

This book is a major reassessment of the French Revolution’s impact on the English novel of the Romantic period. Focusing particularly – but by no means exclusively – on women writers of the time, it explores the enthusiasm, wariness, or hostility with which the Revolution was interpreted and represented for then-contemporary readers. A team of international scholars study how English Romantic novelists sought to guide the British response to an event that seemed likely to turn the world upside down.

Weimar and Work: Labor, Literature, and Industrial Modernity on the Weimar Left analyzes writing about work that was published in communist and anarchist newspapers during the Weimar Republic. By discussing texts that have been almost completely neglected, this book’s approach departs from existing scholarship on Weimar in two significant ways. First, it analyzes these texts in the context of the period’s dominant theories, practices, psychologies, and utopian ideas concerning labor. Due to the proximity of artistic and industrial «production,» particularly in the minds and practices of Weimar communists, this book considers these literary treatments of work also within the framework of literary and artistic meta-discourses during the Weimar Republic (e.g., Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Productivism). Second, Weimar and Work demonstrates how the works of B. Traven and other anarchist writers opened up real and conceptual spaces beyond the hegemonic and allegedly binary opposition between Americanism and Bolshevism. Such spaces allowed for the questioning of the very notion of waged work and critiqued the productivism of communist literature and cultural politics.

Magnificent Houses in Twentieth Century European Literature is a collection of great and imaginative essays that explore the theme of magnificent and aesthetically interesting houses in twentieth century European literature. It focuses especially on important works by Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Siegfried Lenz, while also discussing other significant houses in modern European literature.

Scheherazade, the storyteller of 1001 Arabian Nights, recounts stories literally to save her people, and in Scheherazade’s Daughters, Barbara Bennett explores how contemporary female authors attempt to save their own world by telling compelling stories that disseminate ideas of justice and equality for all living things, a philosophy called ecofeminism. Bennett examines how ecofeminism works in works by Margaret Atwood (Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx & Crake), Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams, The Poisonwood Bible, and Prodigal Summer), and Ruth Ozeki (My Year of Meats and All over Creation).Bennett also analyzes ecofeminism in autobiography and memoir in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, and Sandra Steingraber’s Living Downstream. Lastly through Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Bennett investigates how magical realism can spread the positive ideas of ecofeminism.This groundbreaking book dissects the power of literature to convert minds and hearts in a direction that has the potential, like Scheherazade’s stories, to change our world for the better.

The modernist movement, in literature as well as in criticism, provides a very instructive case of iconoclastic canon-change and subsequent canon-formation, and modern British literary criticism has been remarkably canon-forming in its basic tendency. This is particularly true of the line in British criticism that has revealed strong cultural preoccupations primarily centered on the works of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. George Orwell is a figure in the history of British cultural criticism who links the pre-war and the post-war generations of modernist writers and critics. Raymond Williams is the direct continuator of the line in English literary and cultural criticism formed by Eliot, Lawrence, and Leavis. The first seven of the essays collected in this book deal with Western intellectuals – in fact, with this largely British tradition of cultural criticism. They continue the argument, centered on these main figures, as it has subsequently developed in the works of Christopher Caudwell, E. P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and John McGrath, among others, and touch upon more contemporary literary and cultural issues. Some of these issues, such as the spread of Islamophobia among a number of contemporary British intellectuals, are also discussed in another chapter in the book, and the division of what may be called the international intelligentsia into radicals, pundits, renegades, and imposters, in another chapter. The last three essays deal with major Arab intellectuals and Arab literary and cultural concerns. They focus mainly on the relationships of these key figures with political power, cultural identity, and exile.