A collection of new essays bringing into view the push and pull of the national and the international in the German-language cultural field of the period. The cultural formations of the so-called Age of Nationalism (1848-1919) have shaped German-language literary studies to the present day, for better or worse. Literary histories, German self-representations, the view from abroad - all of these perspectives offer images of a culture ever more concerned with formulating a coherent, nationally focused idea of its origins, history, and cultural community. But even in this historical moment the German-speaking territories were not culturally self-contained; international forces always played a significant role in the constitution of the so-called "German" literary and cultural field. This volume rethinks the historical period with fourteen case studies that bring into view the push and pull of the national and international in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, undertaking a reframing of literary-cultural history that recognizes the interrelatedness of literatures and cultures across political and linguistic boundaries. Viewing even overtly national literary and cultural projects as belonging to an international system, these case studies examine the interrelations, organization, and positioning of the agents, forces, enterprises, and processes that constituted the German-language literary-cultural field, locating these ostensibly national developments within an inter- or even anti-national context.

Explores the concept of "distant reading" and its application to the analysis of nineteenth-century German literature and culture, drawing on a range of approaches from the emerging digital humanities field. In nineteenth-century Germany, breakthroughs in printing technology and an increasingly literate populace led to an unprecedented print production boom that has long presented scholars with a challenge: how to read it all? This anthology seeks new answers to the scholarly quandary of the abundance of text. Responding to Franco Moretti's call for "distant reading" and modeling a range of innovative approaches to literary-historical analysis informed by theburgeoning field of digital humanities, it asks what happens when we shift our focus from the one to the many, from the work to the network. The thirteen essays in this volume explore the evolving concept of "distant reading"and its application to the analysis of German literature and culture in the long nineteenth century. The contributors consider how new digital technologies enable both the testing of hypotheses and the discovery of patterns and trends, as well as how "distant" and traditional "close" reading can complement each another in hybrid models of analysis that maintain careful attention to detail, but also make calculation, enumeration, and empirical descriptioncritical elements of interpretation. Contributors: Kirsten Belgum, Tobias Boes, Matt Erlin, Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer, Lutz Koepnick, Todd Kontje, Peter M. McIsaac, Katja Mellmann, Nicolas Pethes, Andrew Piper and Mark Algee-Hewitt, Allen Beye Riddell, Lynne Tatlock, Paul A. Youngman and Ted Carmichael. Matt Erlin is Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Assesses the relevance of the works of Fontane, perhaps the foremost German novelist between Goethe and Mann, for the twenty-first century. Theodor Fontane remains a canonical figure in German literature, the most important representative of poetic realism, and likely the best German-language novelist between Goethe and Mann, yet scholarly attention to his works oftenlags behind his stature, at least in the English-speaking academy. This volume, coinciding with Fontane's 200th birthday in 2019, assesses the relevance of his works for us today and also draws attention to the most current English-language research. Much has changed in the last two decades in critical theory, and the volume highlights how new methodological approaches and new archival research can update our understanding of Fontane's works. Although his novels are famously rooted in the details of quotidian life in nineteenth-century Germany, they also reflect larger historical transformations that resonate with our world today (e.g., financial crisis, class conflict, changing gender roles, and migration) and so speak to contemporary critical interests. The volume's contributors draw on literary and cultural studies approaches including gender and sexuality studies, emotion studies, transnationalismand globalization, media and visual studies, rhetorical criticism, paratextual criticism, and digital humanities. Their contributions survey a wide range of Fontane's literary production in order to speak to both German and non-German audiences in the twenty-first century. Contributors: James N. Bade, Russell A. Berman, Katharina Adeline Engler-Coldren, Todd Kontje, John B. Lyon, Ervin Malakaj, Nicolas von Passavant, Lynne Tatlock, Christian Thomas, Brian Tucker, Michael J. White, Holly A. Yanacek. John B. Lyon is Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh. Brian Tucker is Associate Professor of German at Wabash College.

First English translation of the famous German novel about a woman's struggle against Victorian social conventions, now in paperback for classroom use. Upon publication in 1895, Gabriele Reuter's From a Good Family (Aus guter Familie) became something of a cultural event, making its author one of Germany's most talked-about women of letters. Set in the first two decades of the Second German Reich, this story of a Prussian bureaucrat's daughter caught between conformity and rebellion struck at the core of the class that upheld the empire, revealing the hypocrisy and misery at the very heart of the bourgeois family. It recorded the conflicted and ultimately interminable adolescence of a middle-class girl who failed to fulfill the destiny prescribed for her by her gender and class, a young woman who, despite an incipient high-spiritedness and independence of mind, internalized the attitudes of her culture to the point of lethal self-censorship. Gabriele Reuter (1859-1941) began writing in her teens but did not experience a literary and commercial breakthrough until the publication of From a Good Family in 1895. This success enabled her finally to live as a freelance writer. In addition to a string of popular novels she wrote essays and sketches for German and Austrian newspapers; in the 1920s and 1930s she regularly reviewed German books for the New York Times. Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanitiesat Washington University in St. Louis.

Translation of nineteenth-century novel of life in a still-feudal Moravian village. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) is Austria's most important nineteenth-century woman writer, but her works have remained largely unknown to English speakers, even her most important, the compelling Their Pavel, firstpublished serially in 1887. Based on a true incident, Their Pavel investigates the troubled social relations of a Moravian village that is endowed with the right of local governance but steeped in the habits of its feudalrelationship to the local barony. The novel explores the parallel fates of the children of a hanged murderer and thief. Milada, the appealing and alert daughter, is adopted on a whim by the aging baroness, while Pavel, the awkwardand taciturn son, is thrown upon the uncertain mercy of the village, but both suffer the stigma of their father's crime. In her sometimes grimly humorous picture of village life, the author spares neither the Catholic Church northe landed aristocracy nor the villagers themselves. Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington Universityin St. Louis.

Essays examining the circulation and adaptation of German culture in the United States during the long 19th century. Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, this volume emphasizes the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. The fourteen essays by scholars from the US and Germany treat such topics as translation, the reading of German literature in America, the adaptation of German ideas and educational ideals, the reception and transformation of European genres of writing, and the status of the "German" and the "European" in celebrations of American culture and criticisms of American racism. The volume contributes to the ongoing re-conception of American culture as significantly informed by non-English-speaking European cultures. It also participates in the efforts of historians and literary scholars to re-theorize the construction of national cultures. Questions regarding hybridity, cultural agency, and strategies of acculturation have long been at the center of postcolonial studies, but as this volume demonstrates, these phenomena are not merely operative in encounters between colonizers and colonized: they are also fundamental to the early American reception and appropriation of German cultural materials. Contributors: Hinrich C. Seeba, Eric Ames, Claudia Liebrand, Paul Michael Lutzeler, Kirsten Belgum, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Linda Rugg, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Gerhard Weiss, Lorie Vanchena. Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Matt Erlin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Lynne Tatlock examines the transmission, diffusion, and literary survival of Jane Eyre in the German-speaking territories and the significance and effects thereof, 1848-1918. Engaging with scholarship on the romance novel, she presents an historical case study of the generative power and protean nature of Bronte's new romance narrative in German translation, adaptation, and imitation as it involved multiple agents, from writers and playwrights to readers, publishers, illustrators, reviewers, editors, adaptors, and translators. Jane Eyre in German Lands traces the ramifications in the paths of transfer that testify to widespread creative investment in romance as new ideas of women's freedom and equality topped the horizon and sought a home, especially in the middle classes. As Tatlock outlines, the multiple German instantiations of Bronte's novel-four translations, three abridgments, three adaptations for general readers, nine adaptations for younger readers, plays, farces, and particularly the fiction of the popular German writer E. Marlitt and its many adaptations-evince a struggle over its meaning and promise. Yet precisely this multiplicity (repetition, redundancy, and proliferation) combined with the romance narrative's intrinsic appeal in the decades between the March Revolutions and women's franchise enabled the cultural diffusion, impact, and long-term survival of Jane Eyre as German reading. Though its focus on the circulation of texts across linguistic boundaries and intertwined literary markets and reading cultures, Jane Eyre in German Lands unsettles the national paradigm of literary history and makes a case for a fuller and inclusive account of the German literary field.

Lynne Tatlock examines the transmission, diffusion, and literary survival of Jane Eyre in the German-speaking territories and the significance and effects thereof, 1848-1918. Engaging with scholarship on the romance novel, she presents an historical case study of the generative power and protean nature of Brontë’s new romance narrative in German translation, adaptation, and imitation as it involved multiple agents, from writers and playwrights to readers, publishers, illustrators, reviewers, editors, adaptors, and translators. Jane Eyre in German Lands traces the ramifications in the paths of transfer that testify to widespread creative investment in romance as new ideas of women’s freedom and equality topped the horizon and sought a home, especially in the middle classes. As Tatlock outlines, the multiple German instantiations of Brontë’s novel—four translations, three abridgments, three adaptations for general readers, nine adaptations for younger readers, plays, farces, and particularly the fiction of the popular German writer E. Marlitt and its many adaptations—evince a struggle over its meaning and promise. Yet precisely this multiplicity (repetition, redundancy, and proliferation) combined with the romance narrative’s intrinsic appeal in the decades between the March Revolutions and women’s franchise enabled the cultural diffusion, impact, and long-term survival of Jane Eyre as German reading. Though its focus on the circulation of texts across linguistic boundaries and intertwined literary markets and reading cultures, Jane Eyre in German Lands unsettles the national paradigm of literary history and makes a case for a fuller and inclusive account of the German literary field.

Foreword by Gunter Grass
This anthology gives a sense of the broad range of prose writing, the many interests of the seventeenth century intellectual, a rich diversity of genres, fictions and non-fictions.

Foreword by Gunter Grass
This anthology gives a sense of the broad range of prose writing, the many interests of the seventeenth century intellectual, a rich diversity of genres, fictions and non-fictions.

Essays examining aspects of German book history -- in relation to writers, readers, and publishers -- from the 1780s to the 1930s. Over the long nineteenth century, German book publishing experienced an unprecedented boom, outstripping by 1910 all other Western nations. Responding to the spread of literacy, publishers found new marketing methods and recalibrated their relationships to authors. Technical innovations made books for a range of budgets possible. Yearbooks, encyclopedias, and boxed sets also multiplied. A renewed interest in connoisseurship meant that books signified tasteand affiliation. While reading could be a group activity, the splintering of the publishing industry into niche markets made it seem an ever-more private and individualistic affair, promising variously self-help, information, Bildung, moral edification, and titillation. The essays in this volume examine what Robert Darnton has termed the "communications circuit": the life-cycle of the book as a convergence of complex cultural, social, and economicphenomena. In examining facets of the lives of select books from the late 1780s to the early 1930s that Germans actually read, the essays present a complex and nuanced picture of writing, publishing, and reading in the shadow of nation building and class formation, and suggest how the analysis of texts and the study of books can inform one another. Contributors: Jennifer Askey, Ulrich Bach, Kirsten Belgum, Matthew Erlin, Jana Mikota, Mary Paddock, Theodore Rippey, Jeffrey Sammons, Lynne Tatlock, Katrin Voelkner, Karin Wurst. Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

First published in 1690, " The Court Midwife" made Justine Siegemund (1636-1705) the spokesperson for the art of midwifery at a time when most obstetrical texts were written by men. More than a technical manual, "The Court Midwife" contains descriptions of obstetric techniques of midwifery and its attendant social pressures. Siegemund's visibility as a writer, midwife, and proponent of an incipient professionalism accorded her a status virtually unknown to German women in the seventeenth century. Translated here into English for the first time, "The Court Midwife" contains riveting birthing scenes, sworn testimonials by former patients, and a brief autobiography.