Combat is one of the central themes of Middle High German narrative literature, and of significant interest to medievalists in general. Nevertheless, few studies to date have attempted a detailed analysis of the depiction of combat in literary texts. Rachel Kellett uses an inclusive approach to the details of combat descriptions in order to analyse minutely the scenes of single combat and battle presented in two major narrative works by Der Stricker, the epic Karl der Große and the Arthurian romance Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal, written between 1220 and 1250. The author compares these works with a wide range of other texts, both French and German, and investigates the relationship between Stricker’s depiction of combat and that found in the works of Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach among others. She also draws on historical research into medieval warfare, tournament and the tradition of the judicial combat, which adds valuable depth to her analysis of literary texts. Overall, this study provides new insights into the depiction of combat in Middle High German literature as a whole, while at the same time highlighting hitherto unnoticed aspects of the writings of Der Stricker as an individual author, and bringing a new perspective on the ambiguous role played by combat in the equally ambiguous Daniel von dem Blühenden Tal.

About the author

Rachel E. Kellett

Building on recent investigations into affinities between early German Romanticism and French post-structuralism, this study brings together the work of Jacques Derrida with the writings of one of early Romanticism’s most important theorists, Frie

drich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), better known as Novalis. In contrast to recent criticism, which traces the historical path from Romanticism to modern theory in broad strokes, this book undertakes comparative readings of Novalis’ and Derrida’s texts on literature and philosophy. The book focuses on the significance both writers accord to paradox and argues that readings which are attuned to paradox can better appreciate the proximity of Romanticism and post- structuralism. As well as their affirmation of paradox, the texts of Novalis and Derrida testify to a profound respect for the Other, and the close readings of selected texts reveal remarkable similarities in their thinking on literature, philosophy and representation, and on the intricate interrelation between language, identity and desire.

About the author

Clare Kennedy

The turn of the twentieth century was a time of identity crisis for the upper and middle classes, one in which increased social mobility caused the blurring of traditional boundaries and created a

need for reference works such as the British Who’s Who (1897). At the same time, the rise of a new leisure industry and an increase in international travel led to a boom period for confidence men, who frequently operated in hotels and holiday resorts. Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, written between 1910-13 and continued (though never completed) in 1951-54, uses contemporary accounts of these figures as a starting-point from which to explore the aesthetics of society. The early Krull marks an important stage in Mann’s development in a number of respects. In writing it, Mann acquired a more flexible conception of identity and a new understanding of the relation between artist and public. Krull also signals a deeper engagement with Goethe and a shift in Mann’s work towards a more open treatment of sexuality. The novel presents art as being central to the development of the individual and to social interaction. While Krull is nominally a confidence man, he is more of a performance artist, a purveyor of beauty who relies upon the complicity of his aud

ience. The later Krull takes up where Mann left off and continues the justification of art as an essential human activity. This study draws upon unpublished material in order to provide a comprehensive reading of Felix Krull. It examines the novel within the context of Mann’s work as a whole, and, in doing so, it seeks to demonstrate the remarkable continuity of Mann’s creative achievement.

About the author

Ernest Schonfield teaches German language and literature at Oxford University, Kings College London and UCL.

‘Beyond Écriture féminine’ is the first book to be published exploring the work of the contemporary French author Jeanne Hyvrard (1945- ) from her early novels of the 1970s to more rec

ent texts of the 1990s and beyond. Moving critical accounts of Hyvrard beyond a focus upon écriture féminine, it identifies the patterns through which her writing repeats and transforms creation mythology, her own oeuvre, and her own life, examining how intertextual repetitions bind her work together into a complex and ever-expanding web of allusions and resonances which engages the reader in a process of constant re-interpretation, challenging notions of linearity and reflecting the ‘chaotic’ reality of life in the Hyvrardian world.

About the author

Cathy Helen Wardle

Following her conversion to Catholicism in 1926, Gertrud von le Fort (1876–1971) developed literary forms in her fiction and verse that sought to allow readers imaginative access to her sacramental vision of reality. Le Fort’s contribution to German literature has often been identified narrowly with the Christian inner emigration during the Third Reich. This study’s concentrationon the period 1924–46 extends the critical perspective towards a more nuanced assessment of her work that pays appropriate attention to the literary, theological, and socio-cultural context of German Catholicism in the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. Scholars have considered, but by no means discussed exhaustively, whether a German literary renouveau catholique emerged in the first half of the twentieth century akin to that witnessed slightly earlier in France. This study demonstrates that le Fort’s work does indeed belong to a flourishing period of Catholic culture in Germany, but one fraught with the complexities of the national culture out of which it emerged. The three main thematic and chronologically arranged parts of the study address, respectively, the importance of religious conversion in le Fort’s work; her problematic sense of German and Catholic identity in the years immediately before the establishing of the Third Reich; and, lastly, her literary inner emigration and response to National Socialism. Throughout the study, the term ‘sacramental realism’ is used to aid a new evaluation of the interdependence of theology and aesthetics that underlies le Fort’s literary work. This study presents a revised approach to a significant, but often misconstrued, area of Catholic literature during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich.

About the author

Helena M. Tomko

Also published for the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies School of Advanced Study, University of London.

“…engagingly presented… a serious contribution to Roth scholarship.” Austrian Studies, Vol 15 (2007)

This is the first monograph on the work of Joseph Roth (1894-1939) to be published in English by a British-based academic, and should prove useful both to those with a specialized interest in Roth, whose novels and journalism continue to gain admirers around the world, and to those interested more broadly in an extraordinarily rich period in twentieth century European culture. It serves both as an introduction to the early part of a body of work whose variety and volume were for many years overshadowed by the reputation of the historical novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), and as a re-assessment of Roth’s writing, both of fiction and of journalism, within the modern tradition. A perceived fragmentation of social, political,cultural and other traditions was a particular concern for Roth, as for many contemporaries, and the thematic chapters present a detailed contextual survey of Roth’s intense and often ambivalent engagement with aspects of modern life, including travel, gender, technology, the city, and cinema. Besides assessing the continuities and discontinuities in Roth’s attitudes, these chapters examine how his responses to the contemporary world impact upon both the form and content of his writing. The author argues that Roth’s writing of the 1920s should be considered modernist not just in its often prescient sensitivity to cultural and political developments, but in its employment of a formal aesthetics and narrative self-consciousness which eventually made possible the illusory wholeness of the later fiction.

About the author

Jon Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in German. He has been a Research Officer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies in Sussex and a Lecturer in German at King’s College London. He then joined Royal Holloway in 2003.

This is the first study to demonstrate the impact of Puritan literature on the development of German language and literature in the seventeenth century and beyond. It crosses the boundaries of theology, literature, and the English and German traditions to show that eighteenth-century secular thinking on introspection, psychology and subjectivity has its roots in vocabulary used in Germany as early as 1665 through the translation of figures such as Daniel Dyke and Richard Baxter. The book concludes with insights on John Bunyan, whose works inspired writers of the ‘Geniegeneration’ such as Lenz, Wieland, Moritz and Jung Stilling.

About the author

Peter Damrau is a lecturer in German a the University of London. His research interests are in devotional literature of the 17th century and women’s writing of the 18th century.

This volume is the first comprehensive study of the influence of English Pre-Raphaelitism on Italian art and culture in the late nineteenth century. Analysis of the cultural relations between Italy and Britain has focused traditionally on the special place that Italy had in the British imagination, but the cultural and artistic exchanges between the two countries have been much misunderstood. This book aims to correct this imbalance by placing Pre-Rapahelitism in its European context.

It explores the nature of its influence on Italy, how it was transmitted, and how it was manifested, by focusing on the role of Italian Anglophiles, the English communities in Florence and Rome, the writings of Gabriele D’Annunzio, and a number of Italian artists active in Tuscany and Rome. The works of Cellini, Ricci, Gioja, De Carolis, and Sartorio in particular fully demonstrate the impact of Pre-Raphaelitism on the young Italian school of painting which found in the English movement an ideal link with its glorious past on which it could build a new artistic identity. These artists show that English Pre-Raphaelitism was one of the most powerful single influences on fin-de-siècle Italian culture.

About the author

Giuliana Pieri is a senior Lecturer in Italian. Her research interests are in 19th and 20th century Italian literature and the visual arts.

The Role of Intertext in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin, Günter Grass’s Ein weites Feld, and Herta Müller’s Niederungen and Reisende auf einem Bein In the structuring of literary texts that refer extensively to previous texts, one issue is paramount: the space accorded to the reader. In entering into the intertextual debate, the reader is called upon both to corroborate the authority of the text and the power of literary continuity that the intertext embodies, and to assert his or her independence from this same authority in the very act of responding individually to its multiple significations. This study of four literary texts, allvery distinct in form and method, analyses the dynamic relationship between reader, text and intertext and suggests that it is in the effectiveness of this manoeuvring, by and of the reader, that the intertextual narrative can be shown to find its force. In Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin the pornographic, psychoanalytic and musical intertexts form a discursive nexus of effects, central to the construction of a highly ironic narrative voice that unsettles and energizes the reader into critical response. The intertextual game of Ein weites Feld creates a text that is structurally and thematically ‘out of control’: by this means Grass brings the reader into confrontation with the celebratory discourses of German reunification. Herta Müller’s depiction of the village idyll in Niederungen embraces and disrupts the Heimat genre. The quotational mode, and our discomfort in responding to it, allows for the critical articulation of questions of authority and control with which the stories are concerned, while Müller’s use of a Calvino intertext in Reisende auf einem Bein is fundamental in the development of a central character whose elusive quality reflects (on) thematic issues addressed by the text.

About the author

Morwenna Symons

The eighteenth century saw the first significant phase of cultural interchange between Britain and Germany. This study examines the part played in this process by women writers, who were entering the literary world in large numbers for the first time. It asks whether women – as readers, translators and authors – were particularly receptive to the work of other women, and whether a cross-cultural female literary tradition emerged during the period.

The study offers a detailed case-study of the German writer Benedikte Naubert, now known for her collection of fairytales but also a prolific novelist. It looks first at Naubert’s engagement with English literature, that is to say at her numerous translations of English novels, and at the ways in which Anglophilia influenced the production of her own fiction. It establishes how Naubert’s interest in England and English literature was related to her position as a woman writer. It then examines the reception of her novels and stories in Britain, questioning how far the response to her texts was related to issues of gender.

Naubert’s work is compared throughout to that of other women writers, and the study thus sheds new light on the extent to which cross-cultural interchange influenced the development of women’s writing in both countries.

About the author

Hilary Brown