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73 books match the query 'German literature' and 3 start with i

cover of Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State

Imperial Fictions

German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State

Todd Kontje

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Imperial Fictions explores ways in which writers from late antiquity to the present have imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. It takes as its point of departure challenges to the discrete nation-state posed by globalization, migration, and European integration today, but then circles back to the beginnings of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike nationalist literary historians of the nineteenth century, who sought the tribal roots of an allegedly homogeneous people, this study finds a distant mirror of analogous processes today in the fluid mixtures and movements of peoples. Imperial Fictions argues that it is time to stop thinking about today’s multicultural present as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past. We should rather consider the various permutations of “German” identities that have been negotiated within local and imperial contexts from the early Middle Ages to the present.
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cover of Interiority in German Women's Writing

Interiority in German Women's Writing

Beate Allert

University of Delaware Press, 2026

Interiority in German Women’s Writing for the first time systematically gathers and engages with contributions of German women authors to the discourse on interiority (Innerlichkeit) from 1750 to 1850. This volume shifts the recent focus on abstract theoretical and medical discourses on inwardness to the origins of interiority in literature and philosophy as written and experienced by women from the Age of Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) to the Romantic era. At the same time, it makes a claim for and explores the ramifications of understanding interiority as a feminine discourse. Contributors investigate the works of women authors who searched to find rescue from their cultural and personal entrapment via creative spaces and various modes of interiority in theatrical performances, poetic writings, letters, biographical narratives, prose, and fairy tales. From the case studies and literary analyses in the volume, interiority emerges as a spectrum of approaches to defining, resisting, and transforming the innermost self. 

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cover of Irony's Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition

Irony's Antics

Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition

Erica Weitzman

Northwestern University Press, 2014

Irony’s Antics marks a major intervention into the underexplored role of the comic and its relationship to irony in German letters.
Combining theoretical breadth with close textual analysis, Erica Weitzman shows how irony, a key term for the German romantics, reemerged in the early twentieth century from a postromantic relegation to the nonsensical and the nihilistic in a way that both rethought romantic irony and dramatically extended its reach.
Through readings of works by Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth against the rich history of comic theory (particularly Hegel and Freud), Weitzman traces the development of a specifically comic irony in modern German-language literature and philosophy, a play with the irony that is itself the condition for all play. She thus provides a crucial reevaluation of German literary history and offers new insights into the significance of irony and the comic from the Enlightenment to the present day.
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