Navid Kermani - author, journalist and academic - is one of the most prominent public intellectuals in Germany today. Kermani has been at the forefront of recent debates about Islam and its role in Germany's political, social and cultural life. Instead of emphasizing the differences between ethnic affiliations and religious beliefs, Kermani questions the Western notion of a clear dividing line between Islam, Christianity and Judaism, highlighting instead their affinities. In addition to his political essays, Kermani's travel journalism introduces western audiences to diverse Muslim societies in the world and his fiction provides accessible meditations on first love, contemporary music, death and friendship. This is the first volume of criticism in English dedicated to Kermani's varied work. The book features an extensive interview with the author, a reproduction in German and English of Kermani's famous 2014 Bundestag speech and a collection of critical essays on Kermani's writing. The essays, by major scholars in the field, cover issues such as gender, religion, cosmopolitanism, mystical experiences, and the power of the liberal arts in a time of neoliberal distraction.

Essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived. What is the status of women's writing in German today, in an era when feminism has thoroughly problematized binary conceptions of sex and gender? Drawing on gender and queer theory, including the work of Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which "women's literature" has been conceived. With aneye to the literary and feminist legacy of authors such as Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann, contributors treat the works of many of contemporary Germany's most significant literary voices, including Hatice Akyun, Sibylle Berg,Thea Dorn, Tanja Duckers, Karen Duve, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Katharina Hacker, Charlotte Roche, Julia Schoch, and Antje Ravic Strubel -- authors who, through their writing or their roles in the media, engage with questionsof what it means to be a woman writer in twenty-first-century Germany. Contributors: Hester Baer, Necia Chronister, Helga Druxes, Valerie Heffernan, Alexandra Merley Hill, Lindsay Lawton, Sheridan Marshall, Mihaela Petrescu, Jill Suzanne Smith, Carrie Smith-Prei, Maria Stehle, Katherine Stone. Hester Baer is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland. Alexandra Merley Hill is Associate Professor of German at the University of Portland.

Essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which German women's literature has been conceived. What is the status of women's writing in German today, in an era when feminism has thoroughly problematized binary conceptions of sex and gender? Drawing on gender and queer theory, including the work of Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault, the essays in this volume rethink conventional ways of conceptualizing female authorship and re-examine the formal, aesthetic, and thematic terms in which "women's literature" has been conceived. With aneye to the literary and feminist legacy of authors such as Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann, contributors treat the works of many of contemporary Germany's most significant literary voices, including Hatice Akyun, Sibylle Berg,Thea Dorn, Tanja Duckers, Karen Duve, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, Katharina Hacker, Charlotte Roche, Julia Schoch, and Antje Ravic Strubel -- authors who, through their writing or their roles in the media, engage with questionsof what it means to be a woman writer in twenty-first-century Germany. Contributors: Hester Baer, Necia Chronister, Helga Druxes, Valerie Heffernan, Alexandra Merley Hill, Lindsay Lawton, Sheridan Marshall, Mihaela Petrescu, Jill Suzanne Smith, Carrie Smith-Prei, Maria Stehle, Katherine Stone. Hester Baer is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland. Alexandra Merley Hill is Associate Professor of German at the University of Portland.

With the leverage of digital reproducibility, historical messages of hate are finding new recipients with breathtaking speed and scope. The rapid growth in popularity of right-wing extremist groups in response to transnational economic crises underscores the importance of examining in detail the language and political mobilization strategies of the New Right. In Europe, for example, populist right-wing activists organized around an anti-immigration agenda are becoming more vocal, providing pushback against the increase in migration flows from North Africa and Eastern Europe and countering support for integration with a categorical rejection of multiculturalism. In the United States, anti-immigration sentiment provides a rallying point for political and personal agendas that connect the rhetoric of borders with national, racial, and security issues. Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right in Europe and the United States is an effort to examine and understand these issues, informed by the conviction that an interdisciplinary and transnational approach can allow productive comparison of far-right propaganda strategies in Europe and the United States. With a special emphasis on performing ideology in the far-right music scene, on violent anti-immigrant stances, and on the far right's skillful creation and manipulation of virtual communities, the contributions foreground the cultural shibboleths that are exchanged among far-right supporters on the Internet, which serve to generate a sense of group belonging and the illusion of power far greater that the known numbers of neo-Nazis in any one country might suggest. Moreover, with attention to transatlantic right-wing movements and their use of particularly digital media, the essays in this volume put pressure on the similarities among the various national agents, while accommodating differences in the virtual and sometimes violent identities created and nurtured online.

With the leverage of digital reproducibility, historical messages of hate are finding new recipients with breathtaking speed and scope. The rapid growth in popularity of right-wing extremist groups in response to transnational economic crises underscores the importance of examining in detail the language and political mobilization strategies of the New Right. In Europe, for example, populist right-wing activists organized around an anti-immigration agenda are becoming more vocal, providing pushback against the increase in migration flows from North Africa and Eastern Europe and countering support for integration with a categorical rejection of multiculturalism. In the United States, anti-immigration sentiment provides a rallying point for political and personal agendas that connect the rhetoric of borders with national, racial, and security issues. Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right in Europe and the United States is an effort to examine and understand these issues, informed by the conviction that an interdisciplinary and transnational approach can allow productive comparison of far-right propaganda strategies in Europe and the United States. With a special emphasis on performing ideology in the far-right music scene, on violent anti-immigrant stances, and on the far right's skillful creation and manipulation of virtual communities, the contributions foreground the cultural shibboleths that are exchanged among far-right supporters on the Internet, which serve to generate a sense of group belonging and the illusion of power far greater that the known numbers of neo-Nazis in any one country might suggest. Moreover, with attention to transatlantic right-wing movements and their use of particularly digital media, the essays in this volume put pressure on the similarities among the various national agents, while accommodating differences in the virtual and sometimes violent identities created and nurtured online.

While the decline of the male hero in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature is usually studied in isolation, Druxes uses a major manifestation of this phenomenon--the failing power of the Faust myth--as an interpretive lens through which to illuminate the corresponding rise in the viability of female Faustian heroes or would-be heroes. Her study of the female Faust figure in the realist novels of Stendhal, Gauthier, Keller, James, and the contemporary writer Morgner is further unusual in that she carries out her analyses both against the background of the sociohistorical factors conditioning these female figures and with reference to the mutual interaction of plot and novel form.

Since nineteenth-century writers make female subjectivity the arena in which the conflicts of male subjecthood are debated, their attempts to create female versions of the heroic quest for self-knowledge speak not only to the crisis of the male model but also to the crisis of the realistic novel. Using psychoanalytic theory and French feminist and deconstructionist theory, Helga Druxes shows how the female Faustian quest for worldly knowledge and subjecthood develops a new concept of identity that takes its social constructedness into account, and she demonstrates some of the transgressive narrative strategies that male and female writers have employed, embodying their dissent not only in the creation of a female Faust but in their visions of an authentic female desire for selfhood and socially regenerative female bonding.