German literature in all genres and from all historical periods has exerted an enormous influence on the history of western thought. From Martin Luther, Frederick Schiller, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Gunter Grass, Germany has produced an impressive number of great writers and great works. In German Literature: A Very Short Introduction, Nicholas Boyle illuminates the particular character and power of German literature and explores its impact on the larger cultural world. Boyle presents an engrossing tour of German literature from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, focussing especially on the last 250 years. He examines key themes like idealism, modernism, materialism, trauma and memory, showing how they have imbued the great German writers with such distinctive voices. Indeed, this brief introduction offers broad coverage of German literature, revealing the links between German literature and the German nation, examining the literary and philosophical responses of German writers to social, political, and economic change, and seeking out the connections between Germany's intellectual traditions and its often violent and tragic history.

The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This volume explores German Idealism's impact on philosophy and scientific thought. Fourteen essays, by leading authorities in their respective fields, each focus on the legacy of a particular idea that emerged around 1800, when the underlying concepts of modern philosophy were being formed, challenged and criticised, leaving a legacy that extends to all physical areas and all topics in the philosophical world. From British Idealism to phenomenology, existentialism, pragmatism and French postmodernism, the story of German Idealism's impact on philosophy is here interwoven with man's scientific journey of self-discovery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - from Darwin to Nietzsche to Freud and beyond. Spanning the analytical and Continental divide, this first volume examines Idealism's impact on contemporary philosophical discussions.

The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This second volume explores German Idealism's impact on the historical, social and political thought of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each essay focuses on an idea or concept from the high point of German philosophy around 1800, tracing out its influence on the intervening period and its importance for contemporary discussions. New light is shed on key developments of Idealist thought, such as Marxism, Critical Theory and feminism, and previously unexamined areas of Idealism's influence are discussed for the first time. This unique, interdisciplinary collection traces the impact of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte and others in Britain, Europe, North America and beyond. Its insights represent vital contributions to their respective fields, as well as to our understanding of German Idealism itself.

The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This third volume explores German Idealism's impact on the literature, art and aesthetics of the last two centuries. Each essay focuses on the legacy of an idea or concept from the high point of German philosophy around 1800, tracing out its influence on the intervening period and its importance for contemporary discussions. As well as a broad geographical and historical range, including Greek tragedy, George Eliot, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, and key musicians and artists such as Wagner, Andy Warhol and Frank Lloyd Wright, the volume's thematic focus is broad. Engaging closely with the key aesthetic texts of German Idealism, this collection uses examples from literature, music, art, architecture and museum studies to demonstrate Idealism's continuing influence.

The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This fourth volume explores German Idealism's impact on theology and religious ideas in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With contributions from leading scholars, this collection not only demonstrates the vast range of Idealism's theological influence across different centuries, countries, continents, traditions and religions, but also, in doing so, provides fresh insight into the original ideas and themes with which Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and others were concerned. As well as tracing out the Idealist influence in the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians, philosophers of religion, and theological traditions, from Schleiermacher, to Karl Barth, to Radical Orthodoxy, the essays in this collection bring each debate up to date with a strong focus on Idealism's contemporary relevance.

The essays in this collection, which was originally published in 1986, address fundamental issues of literary realism that have long been given prominence by J. P. Stern, the distinguished writer on German literature and author of the seminal study On Realism. In the prevailing theoretical climate problems associated with literary realism assumed great urgency. Such problems are the notion of literary 'truth to life', the survival of the concept of 'realism' in the light of modern hermeneutical theory, the perspective adopted by the contemporaries of Barthes and inheritors of Nietzsche on the canonical prose writers of the nineteenth century, and the future for an exegetical tradition represented in the work of Erich Auerbach.

This book studies individual works by twelve major writers of German modernism, including Thomas Mann, Musil, Brecht and Rilke, in relation to the history of the twentieth century. It explores the theme of the 'dear purchase', an ideal of moral strenuousness and sacrifice seen as characteristic of Germany after Nietzsche, and reveals the underlying flaw in this notion as a self-justifying value. In this context, it considers the renaissance of German poetry after 1900, the impact of the War of 1914, its aftermath in uncertainty and relativism, and attitudes to the Hitler period, and finally juxtaposes Mann's Felix Krull and Kafka's story Josephine as a deliverance from the value-system of the title. The Introduction, partly autobiographical, traces J. P. Stern's preoccupation with this interpretation of his material in many of the books he published (especially those concerned with Nietzsche and Hitler), and pays tribute to Wittgenstein's influence on his thinking.

Nicholas Boyle's latest work begins with an observation--from theologian and medievalist Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P.--that the Bible should be seen as a divinely ordained mediation between human culture and divine truth. But how far can we say that the Bible is 'literature'? Chenu is surely right that God is revealed in Scripture not through a system of ideas, but through a vivid historical narrative of people and places. But the Bible is also a sacred book. Expanding on this central dilemma, Boyle demonstrates that biblical scholarship and literary criticism must work together in the largely neglected task of integrating theology and modern secular culture. Boyle explores two lines of thought. In the first series of essays, he discusses a range of writers, primarily philosophers and theologians, who have treated the Bible as literature as a means of reconciling the sacred and the secular. In the second series, Boyle moves to the theme of literature as Bible, seeking a Catholic way of reading secular literature. These sophisticated and learned essays--drawn from the Erasmus Lectures Boyle delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2003--cover a remarkable range of philosophers, theologians, and writers, including Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Levinas, Goethe, Austen, Melville, and Tolkien. This volume will reward its reader with penetrating, and often brilliant, insights.

Nicholas Boyle's latest work begins with an observation--from theologian and medievalist Father Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P.--that the Bible should be seen as a divinely ordained mediation between human culture and divine truth. But how far can we say that the Bible is 'literature'? Chenu is surely right that God is revealed in Scripture not through a system of ideas, but through a vivid historical narrative of people and places. But the Bible is also a sacred book. Expanding on this central dilemma, Boyle demonstrates that biblical scholarship and literary criticism must work together in the largely neglected task of integrating theology and modern secular culture. Boyle explores two lines of thought. In the first series of essays, he discusses a range of writers, primarily philosophers and theologians, who have treated the Bible as literature as a means of reconciling the sacred and the secular. In the second series, Boyle moves to the theme of literature as Bible, seeking a Catholic way of reading secular literature. These sophisticated and learned essays--drawn from the Erasmus Lectures Boyle delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 2003--cover a remarkable range of philosophers, theologians, and writers, including Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Levinas, Goethe, Austen, Melville, and Tolkien. This volume will reward its reader with penetrating, and often brilliant, insights.

Theology can no longer exist in isolation from politics, philosophy and literature. This is Nicholas Boyle's basis for an examination of personal and cultural identity in today's world. His exploration of the global mind reveals the continuing importance of a Christian perspective in a secular world. He shows that modern trends towards greater diversity and pluralism and simultaneous trends towards greater unification can be reconciled within the Catholic humanist tradition of theology, philosophy and literature. He identifies Postmodernism as 'the pessimism of an obsolescent class - the salaried official intelligentsia - whose fate is closely bound up with that of the declining nation-state'. In this brilliant book, Dr Boyle gives new grounds for optimism about the emerging new world order>

Along with the spectacular collapse in 1989 of the perspectives imposed by the Cold War, the false certainties of the national and imperial age which shaped our collective and individual identity fell away as well. As we try to regroup and redefine ourselves and our social bonds, we must take into account two seemingly contradictory forces: the trend toward diversity and pluralism, on the one hand, and the pull toward ever greater unification, on the other. In this book, Nicholas Boyle offers ten studies of the implications of the increasingly integrated world economic structure for our sense of political, cultural, and personal identity. He argues for the deep interconnectedness of politics, religion, philosophy, and literature and their shared inseparability from the economic base. In the process, he uses philosophical and literary ideas to establish systematic grounds for optimism about an emerging supra-national order, aiming to restore the possibility of "grand narrative" to our collective past and future. However, his exploration of the global mind does not ignore the many haunting personal questions raised by the upheaval of the 90s: Are we more than consumers and producers? To what extent do our nationhood, our gender, our religious and cultural affiliations still define us? Is a Christian perspective viable in such a secular world? Can literature and philosophy make sense of individual lives? What role will the intellectual class play? Boyle takes a close look at Germany and Britain, their differences and growing similarity. He discusses, among others, Thatcher, Fukuyama, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Seamus Heaney. Boyle asserts that as the world becomes less divided but more disparate, and its order less draconian but more precarious, choosing the paths most likely to lead to justice and peace will reform our shattered sense of identity.

Completed shortly before Professor Stern's death in 1991, this book studies works by twelve major writers of German modernism, including Thomas Mann, Musil, Brecht and Rilke, in relation to the history of the twentieth century. It explores the theme of the "dear purchase," an ideal of moral strenuousness and sacrifice seen as characteristic of Germany after Nietzsche, and reveals the underlying flaw in this notion as a self-justifying value. Finally, it juxtaposes Mann's Felix Krull and Kafka's story "Josephine" as a deliverance from the value-system of the title.

Nicholas Boyle begins with a fascinating survey of earlier versions of the Faust story. He then offers a detailed reading of Faust Part One, emphasising the poetic and dramatic coherence of the work and tracing its links with the thought and culture of Goethe's time. The play emerges as a tragic poem which may, to a certain extent, be read independently of Faust Part Two.