ALBERT

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.

Description: Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), the great German humanist, remained a towering figure in Europe long into the twentieth century. Published in 1954, this translation by Stephen A. Emery and William T. Emery was the first English translation of Dilthey's "Das Wesen der Philosophie" (1907) as well as his first work to be translated completely into English, making Dilthey accessible to scholars of the English-speaking world.

Description: In this study the author challenges previous scholarship which characterizes the work of Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872) as eminently personal and the perception of his male characters as lacking in masculinity. By analyzing male characters in thirteen of Grillparzer's plays as well as the dramatist's comments on his work, Coenen argues that the diversity represented by Grillparzer's male characters paints a much more complete and nuanced vision of the human soul than previously recognized.

Description: Jill Kowalik reevaluates J. J. Breitinger's "Critische Dichtkunst" (1740) with regard to a heretofore neglected aspect of aesthetics in the early eighteenth century, namely how poesis and historiography could increasingly come to resemble each other in their assumptions, purposes, and methods of representation. The central argument states that historians of this period began to utilize the concept of historical perspectivism only after its development as an interpretive tool by the aesthetic thinkers of the early Enlightenment. The "Critische Dichtkunst" is examined in terms of three disparate traditions: the modern reception of Aristotle's "Poetics", Horace's "Ars poetica", and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns the model of consciousness proposed by Leibniz that describes the mind as a ceaseless process of historical intellective integration and the German reception of French neoclassical authors, especially Dubos, whose notion of historical probability was radicalized by Breitinger and later appropriated by poets and historians alike.

Description: These fifteen essays deal with Nietzsche's view of various aspects of classical antiquity as compared to those of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Voltaire, Winkelmann, Hamann, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Byron, the "fin de siècle" Decadents and others. An introductory essay by classical scholar H. Lloyd-Jones plus two essays on Nietzsche's aesthetics by W. Kaufmann and K. Weinberg round out the contributions by M. L. Baeumer, E. Biser, M. Boulby, S. L. Gilman, P. Heller, R. M. Helm, M. Hester, R. S. Fraser, J. C. O'Flaherty, H. Rehder, K. Schlechta, and H. Wingler.

Description: This study is an unorthodox approach to the origin, historicity, and authorship of the anonymous Icelandic sagas. Following the publication of her translation of the "Laxdœla Saga", in this volume Madelung uses her deep knowledge of the text to demonstrate the literary quality and aesthetic structure of the work, especially the function of repetition. She shows that the Saga contains a historical-political analogy between the period in which the story is set (the eleventh century) and the saga-author’s own time two centuries later. The apparently straightforward prose is camouflage, and the symbolism provides the key to the hidden analogy.

Description: This volume is a study in the Romantic reshaping of space and time to evoke the fantastic interior landscape and the temporal dynamics of subjective experience. Close textual analysis is coupled with frequent reference to literary and intellectual history in the reassessment of the narrative art of Novalis and Tieck. The author examines Novalis' "Hyazinth und Rosenblüte", "Atlantis", "Arion" and "Eros und Fabel" as well as Tieck's "Der blonde Eckbert" and "Der Runenberg". A concluding chapter examines spatio-temporal patterns in the Romantic fairy tale at large.