If somebody in the 18th century had wanted to send a love letter using SMS text, they would have been doomed to fail a ' neither the technology nor the recipient would have been able to handle such a flood of emotional signs. Why is that? The present volume collects contributions from a variety of disciplines dealing with hitherto neglected questions of a cultural history of the love letter. The results are surprising a ' the love letter has its own rules, and is far more independent from the development of other forms of written culture than was previously assumed.

Examining the mutual relationship between literature and the visual arts in the Fin de siA]cle the study explores the literary adaptation of ornamental style and the emergence of a specifically modern type of hermetic communication. Abundant intertextual references and allusions contribute to the suggestiveness and subtlety of aestheticist literature, which fascinated modern readers like Simmel, Cassirer and Adorno. Thus, in contrast to a common prejudice against aestheticism, its enthusiastic reception among modern cultural theorists reveals the lasting interest of Fin de siA]cle poetics in the 20th century.

Der vorliegende Band erkundet die deutsche Dante-Rezeption in der Literatur und den Kunsten im 20. Jahrhundert. Er dokumentiert anhand von verschiedenartigen Beispielen die Vielfalt der von der Divina Commedia ausgehenden kunstlerischen Anregungen in Moderne und Gegenwart. Besondere Berucksichtigung finden namhafte Autoren wie Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Werfel, Arno Schmidt, Peter Weiss, Gunter Grass sowie Durs Grunbein. Ferner eroeffnet der Band weitere Ausblicke auf die Dante-Rezeption in der Musik, in der Graphic Novel, in Island sowie im Werk von Primo Levi. Die Beitrage gehen aus einer Tagung hervor, die im Oktober 2012 an der JLU Giessen in Kooperation mit der Universitat Urbino stattgefunden hat.