ALBERT

Description: Sixteen of his former colleagues and students join in this volume in honoring Walter Silz. Concentrating on a single theme—the German drama—this volume contains essays and interpretations of plays ranging from Hrotsvit von Gandersheim to Bertolt Brecht. Eight of the sixteen essays deal with dramas from the area of Silz's main concentration—the nineteenth century. Also included are a tribute to Silz and a bibliography of his writings.

Description: This study identifies the underlying patterns of persistent biblical allusion in the work of renowned playwright Bertolt Brecht. Rather than reducing Brecht's use of the Bible to the purely satirical, the author interprets the full dramatic function of Brecht's complex use of scripture. Using examples from plays written throughout the span of Brecht's career, Murphy shows how Brecht invokes the stories of Old Testament figures such as Job and Isaiah as well as the crucifixion accounts of the New Testament in order to build sympathetic characters and explore his more political themes.

Description: An exploration of the poetic function of Greek archetypes in Schiller's "Wallenstein", this study claims Homer's "Iliad" and Euripides's "Iphigenia in Aulis", the first epic and the last tragic poem about the Trojan War in the Greek tradition, as archetypal sources for Schiller's modern historical drama about the Thirty Years War. In close comparison with Voss's translation of the "Iliad" and Schiller's own translation of "Iphigenia in Aulis", Berns shows how "Wallenstein" compounds echoes of Homeric and Euripidean characters and plots to create a rich horizon of mythical overtones above and beyond the historical world.

Description: These essays represent the push to provide interdisciplinary Brecht research to English-speaking audiences following his death in 1956 and offer novel readings of his works indicative of the major literary questions of the time. The essays explore both Brecht's theoretical approach and political thought, with many also taking a comparative approach to analysis of individual plays. The contributors are Reinhold Grimm, Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Herbert Knust, Hans Meyer, Siegfried Mews, Raymond English, James Lyon, Darko Suvin, Gisela Bahr, Grace Allen, Ralph Ley, John Fuegi, Andrzej Wirth and David Bathrick.

Description: This study presents the historical development of topical drama in the German Democratic Republic from 1945 to 1975. The author investigates the sociopolitical function of both dramas and dramatists such as Karl Grünberg, Friedrich Wolf, and Erwin Strittmatter during the various transitional stages of the GDR's growth toward a socialist society. The substantive, critical study of plays, authors, productions, and dramatic theory is supplemented by a critical analysis of the Socialist Unity Party's cultural and literary policies during the GDR's turbulent history. While Western critics tend to isolate individual GDR dramas and interpret them out of context, Huettich explores in depth how the cultural policy of the GDR significantly helped shape the course of post-World War II drama in the 'planned society.'

Description: An imperishable gem of German literature, Kleist's "The Broken Pitcher" is pure comedy. The author's handling of the theme—the judge as culprit—shows supreme mastery. This translation by Bayard Q. Morgan, originally published in 1961, is faithful in form.

Description: Ellis's book confronts directly the most central issue of Kleist criticism: the essential nature and meaning of his work. Rather than provide a general survey of Kleist's writings, Ellis performs an analysis of six of his most mature works: "Der Findling", "Die Marquise von O. . .", "Das Erdbeben in Chili", "Der Zweitkampf", "Michael Kohlhaas", and "Prinz Friedrich von Homburg". Ellis draws some general conclusions about the uniquely Kleistian character of these six works which are at sharp variance with previous Kleist criticism.

Description: Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women. But though they had written some of the most popular and influential novels of the century, they accepted the taboo against female writers, regarding themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and for posterity.Writing for Immortality studies the lives and works of four prominent members of the first generation of American women who strived for recognition as serious literary artists: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Combining literary criticism and cultural history, Anne E. Boyd examines how these authors negotiated the masculine connotation of "artist," imagining a space for themselves in the literary pantheon. Redrawing the boundaries between male and female literary spheres, and between American and British literary traditions, Boyd shows how these writers rejected the didacticism of the previous generation of women writers and instead drew their inspiration from the most prominent "literary" writers of their day: Emerson, James, Barrett Browning, and Eliot.Placing the works and experiences of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson within contemporary discussions about "genius" and the "American artist," Boyd reaches a sobering conclusion. Although these women were encouraged by the democratic ideals implicit in such concepts, they were equally discouraged by lingering prejudices about their applicability to women.

Description: Originally published in 1960. In E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry, Norman Friedman argues that critics who have focused on what Cummings's poetry lacks have failed to judge Cummings on his strengths. Friedman identifies a main strength of Cummings as his being a "sensual mystic." The book unpacks Cummings's subject matter, devices, and symbolism, ultimately helping readers develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of Cummings's work.

Description: Honorable Mention winner in the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize competition for French and Francophone Literary StudiesA major figure in twentieth-century letters, Albert Cohen (1895–1981) left a paradoxical legacy. His heavily autobiographical, strikingly literary, and polyphonic novels and lyrical essays are widely read by a devout public in France, yet have been largely ignored by academia. A self-consciously Jewish writer and activist, Cohen remained nevertheless ambivalent about Judaism. His self-affirmation as a Jew in juxtaposition with his satirical use of anti-Semitic stereotypes still provokes unease in both republican France and institutional Judaism.In Albert Cohen: Dissonant Voices, the first English-language study of this profound and profoundly misunderstood writer, Jack I. Abecassis traces the recurrent themes of Cohen's works. He reveals the dissonant fractures marking Cohen as a modernist, and analyzes the resistance to his work as a symptom of the will not to understand Cohen's main theme—"the catastrophe of being Jewish."For Abecassis, Cohen's diverse oeuvre forms a single "roman fleuve" exploring this perturbing theme through fragmentation and grotesquerie, fantasies and nightmares, the veiling and unveiling of the unspeakable.Abecassis argues that Cohen should not be read exclusively through the prism of European literature (Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust), but rather as the retelling—inverting and ultimately exhausting, in the form of submerged plots—of the Biblical romances of Joseph and Esther. The romance of the charismatic Court Jew and its performance correlative, the carnival of Purim, generate the logic of Cohen's acute psychological ambivalence, historical consciousness and carnal sensuality—themes which link this modernist author to Genesis as well as to the literary practices of Sephardic crypto-Jews. Abecassis argues that Cohen's best-known work, Belle du Seigneur (1968), besides being an obvious tale of obsessive love and dissolution, is foremost a tale of political intrigue involving Solal, the meteoric-rising Jew in the League of Nations during the period of Appeasement (1936), and his ultimate self-destruction. Providing close readings and imaginative analyses of the entire literary output of one of twentieth-century France's most important Jewish writers, Abecassis presents here a major work of literary scholarship, as well as a broader study of the reception and influence of Jewish thought in French literature and philosophy.