Dramatist Georg Buchner was a qualified medical doctor, primarily a neurologist, fascinated by psychiatry, then in its infancy. This study evaluates Buchner's portrayal of insanity in relation to the medical opinion of his time, and to contemporaneous literary treatments of the same subject in German. It provides a wide range of documentary evidence unfamiliar to literary scholars to reveal the full originality and accuracy of Buchner's insights.
Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives examines the continuing relevance of Büchner in the early twenty-first century in terms of politics, science, philosophy, aesthetics, cultural studies and performance studies. It situates Büchner’s interdisciplinary work in relation to the philosophical, scientific and religious discourses of his time, while also investigating the ways in which Büchner’s intersectional writings anticipated – sometimes uncannily – questions and problems which were to become central concerns in modernism and after. The nineteen essays in the book, some in English and some in German, uniquely combine close readings of individual passages and images with wide-ranging intertextual comparisons, linking Büchner to more than twenty-five writers, thinkers and theoreticians from his time and ours. Der Band Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives beschäftigt sich mit Büchners anhaltender Aktualität in den Bereichen Politik, Naturwissenschaft, Philosophie, Ästhetik, Kulturwissenschaft und Theater. Er setzt Büchners interdisziplinäres Werk in Beziehung zu den philosophischen, naturwissenschaftlichen und religiösen Themen seiner Zeit, untersucht aber auch wie sein Schreiben auf manchmal verblüffende Weise Fragen und Probleme vorwegnimmt, die für die Moderne und die Nachmoderne bis zum heutigen Tag zentral werden sollten. Die neunzehn, teils auf Englisch, teils auf Deutsch verfassten Beiträge zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie eingehende Einzelinterpretationen bestimmter Werkstellen mit weitreichenden intertextuellen Bezügen zu mehr als 25 SchriftstellerInnen, KünstlerInnen, DenkerInnen, und TheoretikerInnen verbinden.
How did ministers, journalists, academics, artists, and subjects in the German lands imagine war during the nineteenth century? The Napoleonic Wars had been the bloodiest in Europe's history, directly affecting millions of Germans, yet their long-term consequences on individuals and on 'politics' are still poorly understood. This study makes sense of contemporaries' memories and histories of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns within a much wider context of press reportage of wars elsewhere in Europe and overseas, debates about military service and the reform of Germany's armies, revolution and counter-revolution, and individuals' experiences of violence and death in their everyday lives. For the majority of the populations of the German states, wars during an era of conscription were not merely a matter of history and memory; rather, they concerned subjects' hopes, fears, and expectations of the future. This is the second volume of Mark Hewitson's study of the violence of war in the German lands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It investigates the complex relationship between military conflicts and the violent acts of individual soldiers. In particular, it considers the contradictory impact of 'pacification' in civilian life and exposure to increasingly destructive technologies of killing during war-time. This contradiction reached its nineteenth-century apogee during the 'wars of unification', leaving an ambiguous imprint on post-war discussions of military conflict.
In Anamorphosic Texts, Maryna Romanets turns a discriminating lens on a still “liminal” Ukrainian cultural space and, through its relation to the experiences of one of the earliest decolonized nations, Ireland, puts it on the discursive postcolonial map, thereby destabilizing the paradigm of homogeneous Eurocentricity adopted by much postcolonial critique. Bringing together two peripheral European literatures, Romanets uses Irish and Ukrainian histories as a shared point of reference, charting an essentially untouched area of comparative typology in postcolonial cultural politics. Returning to the chiaroscuro terrain of respective nineteenth-century Revivalist movements, she projects their volatile energies onto contemporary struggles of the two cultures to represent their occluded, traumatic pasts and ever-evasive presents. In five linked essays, Romanets explores, in their sociocultural contexts, the works of Kostenko, Ní Dhomhnaill, Zabuzhko, Pokalchuk, Vynnychuk, Poderviansky, Longley, Heaney, Murphy, Carson, Montague, Banville, and Izdryk. She examines the ways these authors evoke the significatory powers of their traditions to forge imaginary ones; interrogate the boundaries and slippages among personal, national, social, gendered, and historical disjunctions; and make every history open to revision and contestation. Drawing on postcolonial, intertextual, representation, and gender theories, Anamorphosic Texts reveals the mechanisms of conversion whereby Ukrainian and Irish writers, by engaging in epistemic dialogues with their own traditions, colonial discourses, and multicultural influxes, devise political strategies of empowerment and enunciation.
In nineteenth-century imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, new scientific fields like psychophysics, empirical psychology, clinical psychiatry, and neuroanatomy transformed the understanding of mental life in ways long seen as influencing modernism. Turning to the history of psychiatric classification for mental illnesses, Cate I. Reilly argues that modernist texts can be understood as critically responding to objective scientific models of the psyche, not simply illustrating their findings. Modernist works written in industrializing Central and Eastern Europe historicize the representation of consciousness as a quantifiable phenomenon within techno-scientific modernity. Looking beyond modernism’s well-studied relationship to psychoanalysis, this book tells the story of the non-Freudian vocabulary for mental illnesses that forms the precursor to today’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Developed by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the 1890s, this psychiatric taxonomy grew from the claim that invisible mental illnesses were analogous to physical phenomena in the natural world. Reilly explores how figures such as Georg Büchner, Ernst Toller, Daniel Paul Schreber, Nikolai Evreinov, Vsevolod Ivanov, and Santiago Ramón y Cajal understood the legal and political consequences of representing mental life in physical terms. Working across literary studies, the history of science, psychoanalytic criticism, critical theory, and political philosophy, Psychic Empire is an original account of modernism that shows the link between nineteenth-century scientific research on the mental health of national populations and twenty-first-century globalized, neuroscientific accounts of psychopathology and sanity.
Written in 1836, Woyzeck is often considered to be the first truly modern play. The story of a soldier driven mad by inhuman military discipline and acute social deprivation is told in splintered dialogue and jagged episodes, which are as shocking and telling today as they were when first performed, almost a century after the author's death, in Munich 1913. This edition contains introductory commentary and notes by Laura Martin from the University of Glasgow. METHUEN DRAMA STUDENT EDITIONS are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. A well as the complete text of the play itself, this volume contains: · A chronology of the play and the playwright's life and work · an introductory discussion of the social, political, cultural and economic context in which the play was originally conceived and created · a succinct overview of the creation processes followed and subsequent performance history of the piece · an analysis of, and commentary on, some of the major themes and specific issues addressed by the text · a bibliography of suggested primary and secondary materials for further study.
Originally published in 1951 this full length study gives an account of Büchner’s life and personality, together with an account of his three plays, his unfinished short story, his scientific publications and his translations of Hugo.
