Subject Area: Literature - German

Aspects of Fifteenth-Century Society in the German Carnival Comedies Speculum Hominis

DuBruck, Edelgard E.
1993 0-7734-9328-X 186 pages
This study examines two fields of research: German society of the fifteenth century, and its carnival comedies. This is a detailed treatment of the four classes (peasants, urban middle class, clergy, and nobility), including such aspects as health, the self and its historicity, and general rules of conduct. The German carnival plays are valuable literary texts allowing insight into fifteenth-century life. This book examines most of the 127 comedies in the Keller collection, listed in one of the indices, and provides translations of all quotations into modern English. It also contains a synoptic tabulation of the Nürnberg plays, valuable to both drama specialists and medievalists.

Benjamin Noldmann's History of the Enlightenment in Abyssinia, or An Account of His Own and His Cousin's Residence at the Court of the Great Negus or Prester John

Knigge, Adolph
2024 1-4955-1256-8 404 pages
This is an English translation by John W. Van Cleve. Baron Adolph Franz Ludwig von Knigge was born in 1752 in Bredenbeck, a small town in the Electorate of Hanover, a small state within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. ...Adolph Knigge has long been familiar to German-speaking Europe primarily as the author of a deportment and etiquette guide whose impact there was significant. Otherwise, his activity as sole or contributing author extended to over twenty additional book titles, most of which offered readers a view of the world that was deeply influenced by Enlightenment thinking and liberal politics. -John W. Van Cleve ("Translator's Preface")

Psychological Models of Masculinity in DÖblin, Musil, and Jahnnmännliches, Allzumännliches

Kingerlee, Roger
2001 0-7734-7493-5 412 pages
This book offers original interpretations of three great German-language novels from the 1920s, showing how ecological and feminist debates of today had already been initiated by men at that time. It examines Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz; Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and Hans Henny Jahnn’s Perrudja. Together, these novels illustrate how notions of masculinity had become problematic even by the 1920s; and suggest how increased self-awareness can improve men’s lives. “Dr. Kingerlee’s level-headed and well-informed reading of these notorious complex texts not only makes them accessible to the apprehensive reader, it also convincingly rescues at least one of them from crass accusations of extreme male chauvinism. . . . one of the major virtues of this highly original book is that it provokes one to ask questions about maleness and selfhood and to test out one’s answers against those which are explored in the literary texts under discussion.” – Richard Sheppard

Spiritual Meaning of Material Things in the Novels of Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) A Study in Poetic Realism

Saur, Pamela S
2015 1-4955-0358-5 228 pages
Addresses Adalbert Stifter's view of human relationship to material substances as well as proper ownership and use of possessions in individuals of the middle and higher classes. It builds on past scholarship in two main areas, namely Stifter and nature and the domestic ideal of the "Biedermeier" movement with which he is identified.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN GENDERED DISCOURSE IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY Literary, Philosophical, and Popular Portrayals of Female Orality

Benbow, Heather Merle
2009 0-7734-4722-9 196 pages
This book examines at the gender dimensions of orality in German culture and thought around 1800. It uncovers oral resonances in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, demonstrates that pedagogical and didactic literature about women and girls is based on a suppression of female orality, contrasts medicalized models of (open) female and (closed) male bodies and reinterprets two classic literary heroines in terms of their oral conformity and excess.