This book is an economic analysis of the "Kipper und Wipper" inflation of 1619-23, the most serious German inflation before the hyperinflation following World War I, with a particular focus on how it affected people's lives and behavior. The volume features full-page reproductions of rare contemporary broadsheets--early forerunners of the modern newspaper--with striking illustrations and engaging texts. Published here in their entirety and for the first time in superb English translation, they are a unique window on society at the time and give a voice to the people who were actually devastated by the inflation.

The poems of Elmer Diktonius place him in the forefront of literary expressionism. His idylls and his novel give him high rank among Northern Europe's greatest literary innovators in the twentieth century. He has an unusual drama because of his ambiguous involvement with the politics of the left and his hesitation between internationalism and a deep Finnish patriotism. George C. Schoolfield provides the uninitated reader with a biographical and critical overview of Diktonius's life and work and calls attention to his artistic triumphs, defeats, and contradictions.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a common mind-set emerged among many intellectuals--"la decadence." Many novels and novellas of the period were populated with protagonists who were fragile, refined, self-absorbed, and preoccupied with a trivially exquisite aesthetic. A Baedeker of Decadence presents thirty-two international works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon. Schoolfield tracks down the symptoms of decadence in narrative works written in more than a dozen languages, providing synopses and passages in English translation to give a sense of each author's style and tone. Schoolfield throws new light on the close intellectual kinship of authors from August Strindberg to Bram Stoker to Thomas Mann, and on the ingredients, themes, motifs, and preconceptions that characterized decadent literature.

A new translation of Rilke's groundbreaking volume, following the formal properties of the original poems, especially meter and rhyme, as closely as English allows. Rainer Maria Rilke, the most famous (and important) German language poet of the twentieth century - a master to be ranked with Goethe and Heine - wrote the New Poems of 1907 and 1908 in transition from his late-nineteenth-century style. They mark his appearance as a lyrical, metaphysical poet of the modernist sensibility, often using traditional forms like the sonnet to explore the inner essence, the deep heart, of things - often, quite literally, things. Influenced by his time spent as Rodin's secretary, Rilke turned to quotidian life and sought to artistically redeem it in all its possibilities. His exquisite use of meter and rhyme marks him as a "formalist" and yet a contemporary of Eliot and the later Yeats, so this translation follows, as closely as English allows, the formal properties of the original poems, in a line-for-line version, while trying to capture the spare diction and direct idiomsof modernism. Len Krisak is a recipient of the Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Frost prizes in poetry. He has published more than five hundred poems, including translations from the Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German.

Illuminates the major aspects of the works of Germany's greatest 20th-century poet. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is the best-known German poet of his generation and is widely appreciated today by readers in Europe, the United States, and world-wide. Because of the inventiveness and musicality of his poetic language and the visionary intuition of his thinking, Rilke's influence extends well beyond poetry to include religion, philosophy, the social sciences, and the arts. His works have been widely translated into English, and new enderings of such poem cycles as The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus appear frequently. Critics regard Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as a seminal modern novel. The Companion to Rilke provides essential, up-to-date essays by top Rilke scholars on a wide range of the major aspects of Rilke's life and works. The volume follows the chronology of Rilke's career, emphasizing those works that have met with the greatest critical interest. Among the topics covered are: Rilke's life and thought; the writings before 1902; Das Stunden-Buch and Das Buch der Bilder; the Neue Gedichte, The Cornet and other brief narratives; Malte Laurids Brigge; The Duino Elegies; The Sonnets to Orpheus; Rilke as a poet in French; Rilke and the visual arts. Erika and Michael Metzger (SUNY Buffalo) have written extensively on various aspects ofGerman literature and have edited significant Baroque texts.

A Swedish "Gone with the Wind" by the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature--published here in the first new English translation in more than 100 years
One hundred years ago, Selma Lagerlof became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She assured her place in Swedish letters with this sweeping historical epic, her first and best-loved novel, and the basis for the 1924 silent film of the same name that launched Greta Garbo to stardom. Set in 1820s Sweden, it tells the story of a defrocked minister named Gosta Berling. After his appetite for alcohol and previous indiscretions end his career, Berling finds a home at Ekeby, an ironworks estate owned by Margareta Celsing, the "Majoress," that also houses an assortment of eccentric veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. Berling's defiant and poetic spirit proves magnetic to a string of women, who fall under his spell against the backdrop of political intrigue at Margareta's estate and the magnificent wintry beauty of rural Sweden.

The literature of Finland is bilingual, with lively and extensive traditions in both Finnish and Swedish. This history covers both literary traditions in detail. The volume's first section, on Finnish-language literature, consists of a series of connected chapters by leading authorities within the field. It opens with a consideration of the folk literature in Finnish that flourished during the Middle Ages and then examines the more recent history of Finnish-language literature, with special emphasis placed on writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The second part of the book provides an examination of Finland's Swedish-language literature from the late fifteenth century through the early nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters trace developments in Finland's Swedish-language literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A survey of children's literature--from both the Finnish- and Swedish-language traditions--concludes this exceptionally thorough volume.

A look at neglected aspects of the early career of one of the premier poets of the German language. Although Rainer Maria Rilke and his work have been much studied and written about over the past century -- as befits the perhaps most important German-language poet of modern times -- certain aspects of his early life and career have been neglected or are in need of a fresh look. Accordingly, this book investigates Rilke's life and career from adolescence until the verge of thirty. Here the reader finds the hysterical, harried tutee clinging to Valerie vonRhonfeld; the clever, supercilious, and anxious stroller through Prague of Larenopfer; the narcissistic diarist preening for Lou Andreas-Salome in Italy and elsewhere; the priggishly high-minded but lethal reviewer of German-language literature; the devoted but delusional presenter of Nordic letters. A final section focuses on thirteen poems or poem clusters composed between 1892 and 1900 and mostly left untouched by Rilke scholarship. While depending heavily on the evidence of the texts themselves, the present author allows himself to conjecture about, for instance, the traces left by the boy's hasty training in Latin; his knowledge -- or ignorance -- of Czech national opera and popular literature; the genesis of some willfully "decadent" poems; his odd literary likes and dislikes; and so on. From this "Wirrnis" (confusion, muddle; one of his favorite words), the young Rilke emerges as a dogged self-educator, and, for all his laments and insecurities and languorous poses, a figure of distinction, gifted with an almost preternatural verbal inventiveness and recondite energy. George C. Schoolfield is Emeritus Professor of German and Scandinavian Literature at Yale.

These essays discuss approaches to early modern literature in central Europe, focusing on four pivotal areas: connections between humanism and the new scientific thought; the relationship of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature to ancient and Renaissance European traditions; the social and political context of early modern writing; and the poets' self-consciousness about their work. As a whole, the volume argues that early modern writing in central Europe should not be viewed solely as literature but as the textual product of specific social, political, educational, religious, and economic circumstances. The contributors are Judith P. Aikin, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Thomas W. Best, Dieter Breuer, Barton W. Browning, Gerald Gillespie, Anthony Grafton, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Uwe-K. Ketelsen, Joseph Leighton, Ulrich Mache, Michael M. Metzger, James A. Parente, Jr., Richard Erich Schade, George C. Schoolfield, Peter Skrine, and Ferdinand van Ingen.

This survey of the literary treatment of musicians in German novels and novellas begins with the Romantics and ends with the publication of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. Schoolfield explores the work of a large selection of writers, including Hoffmann, Tieck, Kleist, Brentano, Grillparzer, Werfel and Hesse among many others. Through these works he tracks the progression of the figure of the musician as professional, artist, genius, composer, and pedagogue and how the pursuit of their art is interpreted by major literary movements.

Here are verse translations, with original texts on facing pages, of representative lyrics by ninety-nine poets of the German Baroque. At its original publication, this volume by Schoolfield presented many of the poets to an English-speaking audience for the first time. An extensive introduction discusses the Baroque culture of the German-language realm and brief biographies of the poets conclude the volume.

Sixteen of his former colleagues and students join in this volume in honoring Walter Silz. Concentrating on a single theme-the German drama-this volume contains essays and interpretations of plays ranging from Hrotsvit von Gandersheim to Bertolt Brecht. Eight of the sixteen essays deal with dramas from the area of Silz's main concentration-the nineteenth century. Also included are a tribute to Silz and a bibliography of his writings.