Wilhelm Raabe

Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910) is one of the major figures of 19th-century German Realist writing, acknowledged as an innovator both stylistically and thematically. But until now there has been little concentration on the international and postcolonial dimensions of Raabe's work - his literary critique of colonialism, his engagement with modernization and globalization, his involvement in 19th century German discourses about America, Africa and Asia, and the links between international and national issues in his writing. In Raabe International, contributions from many eminent critics address Raabe both as a writer on world affairs and as a subject himself for translation and comment outside of Germany.

This volume contains an edition of three important historical narratives by Salomon Kohn (1825-1904), a comprehensive bibliography and a thorough study, in which Kohn's work is located in the context of German-Jewish literary and cultural history of the 19th century. The volume thus represents the first ever scholarly engagement with an author who must be regarded as the founder of German-Jewish historical fiction and who belonged to the most popular writers of his time.

Beautiful Jewesses have been among the stock figures featuring in literature in German for centuries. The present study is the first consistent attempt to typify the figure of the 'beautiful Jewess' by examining 70 novels and shorter narratives from four centuries. The 'beautiful Jewess' topos is the expression of a non-Jewish and non-female view, i.e. a view from the outside. The correspondingly stereotyped features of the literary image of the Jewess are traceable from Grimmelshausen to Heinrich Mann. In the history of this motif, we also find a reflection of the problematic nature of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in the course of time. Reference to public discourse on Jewish women and their role in state and society permits a reconstruction of the foundations underlying contemporary attitudes and collective opinion-forming mechanisms determining the image of the Jewess in literary works and the reception accorded to such figures.

Die Studie untersucht, wie Reiseberichte und verwandte Publikationen diskursiv einen Sog nach Afrika erzeugten. Zentrale Verfahren sind die Inszenierung der eigenen Pionierleistung, der Rivalitat mit Konkurrenten um Zugriff auf Afrika und der gegenseitigen UEberbietung und Vermachtniserfullung. Weiterhin werden thematische Bereiche - wie Sklaverei oder Despotismus in afrikanischen Gesellschaften und die Geschichtlichkeit Afrikas - behandelt, welche Begrundungen bereitstellten, die das deutsche Eingreifen in afrikanische Belange nicht nur rechtfertigten, sondern angeblich erforderten. Solche Mechanismen der zunachst diskursiven Bemachtigung des Kontinents erklaren, warum sich in der Beschleunigungs- und Intensivierungsphase deutscher Beschaftigung mit Afrika in den Jahrzehnten nach 1850 ein Einstellungswandel in der deutschen OEffentlichkeit vollzog, der die Inbesitznahme weiter afrikanischer Landstriche durch das Deutsche Reich 1884/85 ermoeglichen half.

It is far too early to determine whether the noughties constitute a distinct period of literary or cultural history with specific characteristics all of their own. It is, nevertheless, timely and illuminating to take a look at individual phenomena that characterize this decade. The articles in this volume discuss certain topical debates (for example surrounding the infamous Austrokoffer literary project, or the debates about pension provision and about religion), they identify emerging trends in Austrian film (the hybridization of genres and the use of the mock-documentary as political intervention), and they highlight new departures in literary expression (recent Romani writing and the rise of the multi-generational family novel). Other contributors to Austrian Studies 19 identify literary engagement with features of contemporary culture (the author as celebrity or the textual exploration of sound and image in the digital age). Finally, The Austrian Noughties volume does not neglect to probe new publications of established authors such as Arno Geiger, Doron Rabinovici, Robert Menasse, Christoph Ransmayr and Josef Winkler.

This volume assembles English translations of three of Wilhelm Raabe's most intriguing narratives. Raabe (1831-1910) was one of the most complex and multi-layered German writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. The three pieces published here for the first time in English are: 'German Moonlight', a tongue-in-cheek study of lunacy and split personality as a quintessentially German condition; 'Hoxter and Corvey', an unsettling reconstruction of civil unrest and anti-Jewish violence in the seventeenth century which advocates tolerance and sobriety in troubled times; and At the Sign of The Wild Man, an inverted genre piece in which a rural idyll is devastated by an agent of global capitalism. All three narratives, written during the first half of the 1870s, contain stinging criticism of the mentality of complacency so prevalent in the newly-founded German Empire; but they also offer moving stories of personal crisis, quiet heroism and noble resignation.

Das Handbuch gibt erstmals einen umfassenden UEberblick uber das Gesamtwerk Wilhelm Raabes (Erzahltexte, Lyrik, Zeichnungen) sowie seine literatur- und kulturgeschichtlichen Kontexte. Hinzu treten biografische, editorische, poetologische und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Grundlagen zum Verstandnis von Raabes Leben und Werk. Als fuhrender Autor des 19. Jahrhunderts war Raabe nicht nur Vertreter des Realismus, sondern stellte die ideologischen, erkenntnistheoretischen und asthetischen Parameter realistischen Erzahlens immer scharfer auf die Probe, um am Jahrhundertende an die Schwelle zur Moderne zu gelangen.

Fresh articles about a much neglected genre, fiction from and about the Jewish ghetto. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries ghetto fiction played an important part in the expression of a particularly German-Jewish quest for identity. The volume Ghetto Writing takes the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Leopold Kompert's collection of ghetto stories Aus dem Ghetto (1848) to fill a gap and give testimony to an important genre that has been unduly silenced in the literary histories of the post-war period. The volume presents some 15 articles by scholars from Scandinavia, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland whose contributions offer new analyses of ghetto writing by well known authors such as Heinrich Heine and Joseph Roth, andcompletely new material on forgotten ghetto writers who deserve to be rediscovered, such as Alexander Granach. The articles cover various types of ghetto writing, ranging from ghetto fiction in the tradition of Leopold Kompert and Karl Emil Franzos, to diaries, travelogues, autobiography, and even contemporary German HipHop and Rap lyrics.