Transatlantic Perspectives - Böcker

Amerikafahrt by Wolfgang Koeppen is a masterpiece of observation, analysis, and writing, based on his 1958 trip to the United States. A major twentieth-century German writer, Koeppen presents a vivid and fascinating portrait of the US in the late 1950s: its major cities, its literary culture, its troubled race relations, its multi-culturalism and its vast loneliness, a motif drawn, in part, from Kafka’s Amerika. A modernist travelogue, the text employs symbol, myth, and image, as if Koeppen sought to answer de Tocqueville’s questions in the manner of Joyce and Kafka. Journey through America is also a meditation on America, intended for a German audience and mindful of the destiny of postwar Europe under many Americanizing influences.

German-American women played many roles in the US women’s rights movement from 1848 to 1890. This book focuses on three figures—Mathilde Wendt, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, and Clara Neymann—who were simultaneously included and excluded from the nativist women’s rights movement. Accordingly, their roles and arguments differed from those of their American colleagues, such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Lucy Stone. Moreover, German-American feminists were confronted with the opposition to the women’s rights movement in their ethnic community of German-Americans. As outsiders in the women’s rights movement they became critics; as “women of two countries” they became translators of feminist and ethnic concerns between German- Americans and the US women’s rights movement; and as messengers they could bridge the gap between American and German women in a transatlantic space. This book explores the relationship between ethnicity and gender and deepens our understanding of nineteenth-century transatlantic relationships.

Scholarly approaches to the relationship between literature and film, ranging from the traditional focus upon fidelity to more recent issues of intertextuality, all contain a significant blind spot: a lack of theoretical and methodological attention to adaptation as an historical and transnational phenomenon. This book argues for a historically informed approach to American popular culture that reconfigures the classically defined adaptation phenomenon as a form of transnational reception. Focusing on several case studies— including the films Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Portrait of a Lady (1997), and the classics The Third Man (1949) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)—the author demonstrates the ways adapted literary works function as social and cultural events in history and how these become important sites of cultural negotiation and struggle.

John Quincy Adams warned Americans not to search abroad for monsters to destroy, yet such figures have frequently habituated the discourses of U.S. foreign policy.  This collection of essays focuses on counter-identities in American consciousness to explain how foreign policies and the discourse surrounding them develop.  Whether it is the seemingly ubiquitous evil of Hitler during World War II or the more complicated perceptions of communism throughout the Cold War, these essays illuminate the cultural contexts that constructed rival identities.  The authors challenge our understanding of “others,” looking at early applications of the concept in the eighteenth century to recent twenty-first century conflicts, establishing how this phenomenon is central to decision making through centuries of conflict.

Scholarly approaches to the relationship between literature and film, ranging from the traditional focus upon fidelity to more recent issues of intertextuality, all contain a significant blind spot: a lack of theoretical and methodological attention to adaptation as an historical and transnational phenomenon. This book argues for a historically informed approach to American popular culture that reconfigures the classically defined adaptation phenomenon as a form of transnational reception. Focusing on several case studies— including the films Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Portrait of a Lady (1997), and the classics The Third Man (1949) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)—the author demonstrates the ways adapted literary works function as social and cultural events in history and how these become important sites of cultural negotiation and struggle.

John Quincy Adams warned Americans not to search abroad for monsters to destroy, yet such figures have frequently habituated the discourses of U.S. foreign policy.  This collection of essays focuses on counter-identities in American consciousness to explain how foreign policies and the discourse surrounding them develop.  Whether it is the seemingly ubiquitous evil of Hitler during World War II or the more complicated perceptions of communism throughout the Cold War, these essays illuminate the cultural contexts that constructed rival identities.  The authors challenge our understanding of “others,” looking at early applications of the concept in the eighteenth century to recent twenty-first century conflicts, establishing how this phenomenon is central to decision making through centuries of conflict.

The Arkansas Regulators is a rousing tale of frontier adventure, first published in German in 1846, but virtually lost to English readers for well over a century. Written in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, but offering a much darker and more violent image of the American frontier, this was the first novel produced by Friedrich Gerstäcker, who would go on to become one of Germany’s most famous and prolific authors. A crucial piece of a nineteenth-century transatlantic literary tradition, this long-awaited translation and scholarly edition of the novel offers a startling revision of the frontier myth from a European perspective.

The Arkansas Regulators is a rousing tale of frontier adventure, first published in German in 1846, but virtually lost to English readers for well over a century. Written in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, but offering a much darker and more violent image of the American frontier, this was the first novel produced by Friedrich Gerstaecker, who would go on to become one of Germany's most famous and prolific authors. A crucial piece of a nineteenth-century transatlantic literary tradition, this long-awaited translation and scholarly edition of the novel offers a startling revision of the frontier myth from a European perspective.

Too often, scholarship on Anglo-American political relations has focused on mutual social and economic interests between Britain and the United States as the basis for cooperation. Breaking new ground, Anglo-American Relations and the Transmission of Ideas instead explores how ideas on either side of the Atlantic have mutually influenced each other. In those transnational interactions, there forms a shared tradition of political ideas, facilitating “a common cast of mind” that has served as the basis for transatlantic relations and political social values for decades.

"'The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky' offers not only a panoramic view of a country poised between devastation and an uncertain future but a gripping self-portrait of a man poised between unresolved youthful bewilderment and a mature clarity of conviction." • Wall Street JournalIn 1945 Melvin J. Lasky, serving in one of the first American divisions that entered Germany after the country’s surrender, began documenting the everyday life of a defeated nation. Travelling widely across both Germany and post-war Europe, Lasky’s diary provides a captivating eye-witness account colored by ongoing socio-political debates and his personal background studying Trotskyism. The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky reproduces the diary’s vivid language as Lasky describes the ideological tensions between the East and West, as well as including critical essays on subjects ranging from Lasky’s life as a transatlantic intellectual, the role of war historians, and the diary as a literary genre.