A Companion to German Realism, 1848-1900

A Companion to German Realism, 1848-1900

Author: Todd Curtis Kontje

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 9781571133229

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This volume of new essays by leading scholars treats a representative sampling of German realist prose from the period 1848 to 1900, the period of its dominance of the German literary landscape. It includes essays on familiar, canonical authors -- Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann -- and canonical texts, but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, such as Luise Mühlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von François, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. The introduction situates German realism in the context of both German literary history and of developments in other European literatures, and surveys the most prominent critical studies of ninteenth-century realism. The essays treat the following topics: Stifter's Brigitta and the lesson of realism; Mühlbach, Ranke, and the truth of historical fiction; regional histories as national history in Freytag's Die Ahnen; gender and nation in Louise von François's historical fiction; theory, reputation, and the career of Friedrich Spielhagen; Wilhelm Raabe and the German colonial experience; the poetics of work in Freytag, Stifter, and Raabe; Jewish identity in Berthold Auerbach's novels; Eugenie Marlitt's narratives of virtuous desire; the appeal of Karl May in the Wilhelmine Empire; Thomas Mann's portrayal of male-male desire in his early short fiction; and Fontane's Effi Briest and the end of realism. Contributors: Robert C. Holub, Brent O. Petersen, Lynne Tatlock, Thomas C. Fox, Jeffrey L. Sammons, John Pizer, Hans J. Rindisbacher, Irene S. Di Maio, Kirsten Belgum, Nina Berman, Robert Tobin, Russell A. Berman. Todd Kontje is professor of German at the University of California, San Diego.


Between the Sign and the Gaze

Between the Sign and the Gaze

Author: Herman Rapaport

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1501729594

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A woman turns into a piece of furniture (Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest); a writer of children's books takes photos of naked little girls (Lewis Carroll); Mont Blanc becomes the maternal breast (Shelley); Hamlet mistakes Ophelia for a phallus (Lacan's Hamlet seminar); and mom turns out to have thermonuclear arms (Laurie Anderson's United States). Reviewing the ways in which women have been fantasized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture, Herman Rapaport offers a series of brilliant insights into the concept of the fantasm in modern art.


No Way Back

No Way Back

Author: Theodor Fontane

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2013-06-06

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0141392169

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A rich and enjoyable novel about marriage, love and betrayal, from the great German realist Theodor Fontane. Charming, cheerful Count Holk is delighted to be called away from his solemn wife to the distant court of a Danish princess. Swept up in the romance of his new, lively surroundings at a 'castle by the sea', the Count does not realize that not everyone there is what they seem - and that a wrong decision may have fatal consequences. Published in 1892, this tragicomic work of failing marriage and modern sexual politics is full of the irony, elegance and masterful dialogue for which Theodor Fontane is acclaimed. Theodor Fontane was born in the Prussian province of Brandenburg in 1819. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he made his living as a writer. From 1855 to 1859, he lived in London and worked as a freelance journalist and press agent for the Prussian embassy. While working as a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 he was taken prisoner, but released after two months. His first novel, Before the Storm, was published when he was fifty-eight and was followed by sixteen further novels, of which Effi Briest, No Way Back and On Tangled Paths are all published in Penguin Classics. He died in 1898. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers have both published extensively on German literature, and translated together the Penguin Classics translation of Fontane's Effi Briest. 'No Way Back has the amplitude, the social and personal varieties, we expect of the major social novel; it surely ranks among the most imaginatively challenging and intellectually satisfying attainments in that dominant nineteenth-century form' - Paul Binding, The Spectator 'Helen Chambers and Hugh Rorrison have improved on the previous English version...natural, idiomatic' - Ritchie Robertson, Times Literary Supplement 'Theodor Fontane's standing in Germany is comparable to Jane Austen's in the English-speaking world...his best work is an elegant and engaging blend of irony, penetration and compassion' Helen Chambers


Locked Out Lily

Locked Out Lily

Author: Nick Lake

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 147119485X

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A startlingly original, delightfully eerie tale for 9+ readers, with stunning illustrations by a renowned and multi-award-winning artist Lily just wants things to go back to the way they were: before she got sick, before her parents decided to have another baby. So when she’s sent away to stay with her grandmother while her mum has the baby, Lily is determined to go home. But she doesn’t expect to find people in her house – people who look like her parents, but definitely aren’t… Together with some unlikely animal companions, Lily must face her fears and summon the courage to break into her own house, and defeat ‘The Replacements’ before the night is out." Allegorical and atmospheric, this is a modern classic to treasure, perfect for fans of Coraline and A Monster Calls. 'A book of such wit and flair and delight: the kind of book you finish and immediately begin again, so that you can live again alongside the characters.’ - Katherine Rundell, bestselling author of Rooftoppers


Bright Magic

Bright Magic

Author: Alfred Doblin

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2016-10-25

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1590179749

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Alfred Döblin’s many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories —astonishingly, the first ever to appear in English—shows him to have been a master of short fiction too. Bright Magic includes all of Döblin’s first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to “She Who Helped,” where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-­century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and “The Ballerina and the Body,” which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, “Materialism, A Fable,” in which news of humanity’s soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.


Effi Briest

Effi Briest

Author: Theodor Fontane

Publisher: The Floating Press

Published: 2010-07-01

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1775418324

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Effi Briest, the classic German realist novel, follows a young woman through her life and marriage. She is an innocent when she is married to the social climbing Instetten, and longs for wordly things. When she is left alone by her husband, who is pursuing his political career, she succumbs to the flattery of another man. Her adultery has wide and tragic consequences on the rest of her life.


Adulterous Nations

Adulterous Nations

Author: Tatiana Kuzmic

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0810133997

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In Adulterous Nations, Tatiana Kuzmic enlarges our perspective on the nineteenth-century novel of adultery, showing how it often served as a metaphor for relationships between the imperialistic and the colonized. In the context of the long-standing practice of gendering nations as female, the novels under discussion here—George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, along with August Šenoa’s The Goldsmith’s Gold and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis—can be understood as depicting international crises on the scale of the nuclear family. In each example, an outsider figure is responsible for the disruption experienced by the family. Kuzmic deftly argues that the hopes, anxieties, and interests of European nations during this period can be discerned in the destabilizing force of adultery. Reading the work of Šenoa and Sienkiewicz, from Croatia and Poland, respectively, Kuzmic illuminates the relationship between the literature of dominant nations and that of the semicolonized territories that posed a threat to them. Ultimately, Kuzmic’s study enhances our understanding of not only these five novels but nineteenth-century European literature more generally.


The Stechlin

The Stechlin

Author: Theodor Fontane

Publisher: Camden House

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9781571130242

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Theodor Fontane (1819-98), widely regarded as Germany's most significant novelist between Goethe and Thomas Mann, pioneered the German novel of manners and upper-class society, following a trend in European fiction of the period. The Stechlin is Fontane's last book and his political testament. Like Effi Briest, his great work on the place of women in Bismarck's empire, it is set at the apex of the Wilhelmine era, both in Berlin and on the estate of a Prussian Junker on the shores of Lake Stechlin. It is a significant historical and cultural document, probably the finest chronicle of the life style of the German upper classes in the late nineteenth century; Fontane portrays the best in the life and ways of the passing Prussian aristocrats, while describing his hopes for the future of Germany and its nobility, which were never to be fully realized. Although this novel has been translated into many languages, it has never before been available in English; this edition thus fills an important gap in the significant works of European literature accessible to English readers.