German Realists in the Nineteenth Century

German Realists in the Nineteenth Century

Author: Georg Lukács

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2000-07-24

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780262621434

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Georg Lukács was one of the most controversial Marxist philosophers of this century. In this book, however, he appears in another guise: as a literary historian in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky, offering an advanced introduction to one of the richest periods of European literature. These previously untranslated essays - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg Büchner, Heinrich Heine, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane - were written between 1936 and 1950. They illuminate Lukács's enduring love of German literature and his faith in the humanist tradition. In all of them, moreover, he can be seen actively intervening in the cultural debates of the time - on the role of literature, on the literary tradition in society, and on the relationship between literature and politics. Although his defense of realism against the crudities of socialist realism is implicit throughout these essays, Lukács's main purpose was to illuminate the intellectual, historical, and literary context in which these great writers worked, to attain a fuller understanding of what they wrote, and also to settle accounts with contemporary German critics who were attempting to create a fascist pantheon.


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.


The Atlantic Realists

The Atlantic Realists

Author: Matthew Specter

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 150362997X

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In The Atlantic Realists, intellectual historian Matthew Specter offers a boldly revisionist interpretation of "realism," a prevalent stance in post-WWII US foreign policy and public discourse and the dominant international relations theory during the Cold War. Challenging the common view of realism as a set of universally binding truths about international affairs, Specter argues that its major features emerged from a century-long dialogue between American and German intellectuals beginning in the late nineteenth century. Specter uncovers an "Atlantic realist" tradition of reflection on the prerogatives of empire and the nature of power politics conditioned by fin de siècle imperial competition, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the Cold War. Focusing on key figures in the evolution of realist thought, including Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, and Wilhelm Grewe, this book traces the development of the realist worldview over a century, dismantling myths about the national interest, Realpolitik, and the "art" of statesmanship.


Double Exposures

Double Exposures

Author: Eric Downing

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780804736787

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Downing s highly original, thorough, and rewarding book is certain to emerge as an indispensable critical reference-point for scholars and students in the areas of narrative theory, problems of realism, and 19th-century German prose. . . . A nearly ideal combination of intellectual scope, erudition, and originality. Thomas Pfau, Duke University To write an engaging and entertaining study of German or poetic realism that offers insightful and differentiated readings of the novellas of Stifter, Storm, Keller, C.F. Meyer, and Raabe through the lenses focused on repetition of narratology, Critical Theory, and psychoanalysis and, to a leser extent gender studies, is without a doubt a daunting endeavor. This study, with its keen analysis of the doubling within German realist texts, is equal to the task. . . . While this book is written to engage and challenge scholars of realism, the clarity of Downing s prose makes the textual twists and turns, and thus the study as a whole, equally accessible to non-specialists. German Studies Review"


The Chain of Things

The Chain of Things

Author: Eric Downing

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-04-15

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1501715925

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In The Chain of Things, Eric Downing shows how the connection between divinatory magic and reading shaped the experience of reading and aesthetics among nineteenth-century realists and modernist thinkers. He explores how writers, artists, and critics such as Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin drew on the ancient practice of divination, connecting the Greek idea of sympathetic magic to the German aesthetic concept of the attunement of mood and atmosphere. Downing deftly traces the genealogical connection between reading and art in classical antiquity, nineteenth-century realism, and modernism, attending to the ways in which the modern re-enchantment of the world—both in nature and human society—consciously engaged ancient practices that aimed at preternatural prediction. Of particular significance to the argument presented in The Chain of Things is how the future figured into the reading of texts during this period, a time when the future as a narrative determinant or article of historical faith was losing its force. Elaborating a new theory of magic as a critical tool, Downing secures crucial links between the governing notions of time, world, the "real," and art.


Realpolitik

Realpolitik

Author: John Bew

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0199331936

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A concise book on Realpolitik: its origins as an idea; its practical application to statecraft in the recent past; and its relevance to contemporary foreign policy.


Menzel's Realism

Menzel's Realism

Author: Michael Fried

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 9780300092196

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Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the 19th century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this study a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues - artistic, scientific, philosophical and socio-political. Michael Fried explores Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and in so doing seeks to make the artist's achievement accessible to a wide audience.


Beyond Realism

Beyond Realism

Author: Elizabeth Allen

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1992-05-01

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0804765677

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Critical studies of Turgenev have tended to focus on his realistic portrayals of nineteenth-century Russian life and have therefore closely allied Turgenev with the dominant literary movement of that time, Realism. By contrast, this book reveals the non-Realist literary patterns that distinguish Turgenev's fiction. In so doing, it newly uncovers an intricate, imaginative vision of human experience that unites poetics and ethics. The first part of the book identifies and assesses the ethical values associated with Realism, finding them rooted in the virtues of the traditional rural community. It then elucidates the very different ethical values that inform Turgenev's art, which are rooted not in the virtues of the community but in those of the individual who creatively conceives and independent ethical stance. Turgenev is thus shown to prize art not as a means of merely representing reality but as a means of demonstrating how human lives can be artistically shaped to achieve psychological and moral fulfillment. In its second part this study addresses various facets of Turgenev's poetics, and the ethical motives behind them, as exemplified in disparate works. One chapter examines how Turgenev orchestrates time and space to illuminate the moral advantages of self-constraint. Another explores Turgenev's adroit management of language to foster imprecision and ambiguity and thereby to prevent explicit articulation of psychologically and morally threatening ideas. Still another chapter concentrates on Turgenev's manipulations of narrative points of view as he displays the benefits of bringing multiple perspectives to bear on painful experience. And a final chapter probes the techniques of characterization Turgenev employs to evaluate varieties of success and failure in pursuit of self-fulfillment. The book concludes by indicating how Turgenev faltered in his last novel precisely by undertaking the Realist enterprise, and how he then reasserted non-Realist aesthetic and ethical principles in his final literary creations, prose poems. Throughout this book, a series of close reading discloses the very rhythm of Turgenev's thought—the nexus between his aesthetic and moral imaginations. These reading reveal Turgenev's belief in "secular salvation," a belief inspired not by faith in otherworldly redemption but by confidence in individual human beings' ability to save themselves from suffering in this world. This study therefore shows Turgenev to be at once more complex and more creative, more modern and more moral, than readers confining him to the realm of Realism have acknowledged.


Prussians, Nazis and Peaceniks

Prussians, Nazis and Peaceniks

Author: Jens Steffek

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-03-16

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1526135736

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In this book, historians and political scientists show how radically external images of Germany changed over the 20th century, from the ‘Prussian military state’ to the ‘bulwark of liberalism.’ They also explore how such images of Germany affected the evolution of international relations theory at some critical junctures.


Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond

Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond

Author: Barbara N. Nagel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-10-17

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1501352733

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Our main words defining emotional states suggest that we have clarity about them: expressions like "love," "hatred," "anxiety," or "sorrow" seem clear enough. The reality, however, tends to be more complicated. We are often faced with gestures and utterances that are difficult to interpret; we thus find ourselves wondering about the affective force of what has just been said: "Was that an insult?" "Flirtation?" "Aggression?" Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond looks at three interlocking forms of social violence--flirtation, passive aggression, and domestic violence. In order to understand their circulation, it traces their literary-historical genealogy in German realism and modernism--in scenes from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Robert Walser, and Franz Kafka, covering a historical period from the middle of the 19th century to the early decades of the 20th century. Reading realist and modernist literature through 21st-century affect theory and vice versa, the analyses collected in this book show the deep literary history of our current cultural predicaments and predilections.