A collection of new essays bringing into view the push and pull of the national and the international in the German-language cultural field of the period. The cultural formations of the so-called Age of Nationalism (1848-1919) have shaped German-language literary studies to the present day, for better or worse. Literary histories, German self-representations, the view from abroad - all of these perspectives offer images of a culture ever more concerned with formulating a coherent, nationally focused idea of its origins, history, and cultural community. But even in this historical moment the German-speaking territories were not culturally self-contained; international forces always played a significant role in the constitution of the so-called "German" literary and cultural field. This volume rethinks the historical period with fourteen case studies that bring into view the push and pull of the national and international in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, undertaking a reframing of literary-cultural history that recognizes the interrelatedness of literatures and cultures across political and linguistic boundaries. Viewing even overtly national literary and cultural projects as belonging to an international system, these case studies examine the interrelations, organization, and positioning of the agents, forces, enterprises, and processes that constituted the German-language literary-cultural field, locating these ostensibly national developments within an inter- or even anti-national context.

This text considers aspects of translation and coins the term transmesis to refer to the depiction of translation and translators within fictional texts. It examines examples of transmesis across a wide variety of languages, cultures, and historical periods to consider the question of how to represent language in literature.

This study compares modern and contemporary literary works from around the globe that have translation as a central theme, and that treat one of four of said black-box issues: language as embodiment; unknown language; conversion; and postcolonial derivations.

Thomas O. Beebee examines epistolary fiction as a major phenomenon in Europe from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. His study is the first to consider epistolary fiction as a pan-European form of importance to all major European languages. It demonstrates that such fiction can be found everywhere, not just in texts aimed specifically at aesthetic consumption. Beebee begins with the premise that the letter was a Protean form which crystallized social relationships in a variety of ways, and that fictional uses of the letter appropriated the status and power the letter had already acquired from its established functions within other discursive practices. He discusses the letter-writing manual, self-referential aspects of the letter, news and travel reporting, the relationship between letters and gender, and historically specific use of epistolarity by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors including Austen, Balzac and Dostoevsky. The book also offers a bibliography of major European epistolary fiction to 1850.

Thomas O. Beebee examines epistolary fiction as a major phenomenon in Europe from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. His study is the first to consider epistolary fiction as a pan-European form of importance to all major European languages. It demonstrates that such fiction can be found everywhere, not just in texts aimed specifically at aesthetic consumption. Beebee begins with the premise that the letter was a Protean form which crystallized social relationships in a variety of ways, and that fictional uses of the letter appropriated the status and power the letter had already acquired from its established functions within other discursive practices. He discusses the letter-writing manual, self-referential aspects of the letter, news and travel reporting, the relationship between letters and gender, and historically specific use of epistolarity by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors including Austen, Balzac and Dostoevsky. The book also offers a bibliography of major European epistolary fiction to 1850.

In altering chapers, the novel tells the stories of Sunamei, a young woman from a rural matriarchal community, and Lian Rui, a self-absorbed man who is also weary witness to the Cultural Revolution. Through his two protagonists, the author addresses themes of the repression and freedon of sexuality, the brutality of modernity, and the fluidity of gender roles as the novel moves hypnotically and inevitably toward a collision between two worlds.

""This is a learned and lively book. It is a scholarly essay that makes for absorbing as well as highly enjoyable reading; it functions as an initiation to modern genre theory while making an important move within that field; it deals with culture high and popular, and a range of texts from the early modern era to the contemporary period; and its writing runs a generic gambit of its own, now theoretical exposition, now ingenious criticism, now theoretical fiction.""-Ross Chambers, University of Michigan ""Besides being impressed with Beebee's overall contribution to genre theory, I am also extremely impressed with his individual chapters, with his comparative methodology in practice, as he reads texts and genres against each other. These readings expose generic instability in very provocative ways. Each chapter, each pair of works struck me as exquisitely performed. This is a work that will appeal to theorists of genre but also to generalists, and especially to those of us beginning to work in cultural studies, for Beebee takes popular culture as seriously as elite, canonical culture.""-J. Douglas Canfield, University of Arizona In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genre counters both formalists and advocates of the ""death of genre,"" arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres ""collide"" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the

"Clarissa" on the Continent defines and explores two strategies of literary translation--creative vs. preservative and strong vs. weak--as they transform one of the most influential English novels. Thomas Beebee compares the two opposing strategies as they influence the French translation of Clarissa by the novelist Antione Francois de Prevost and the German translation by the Gottingen Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, and in doing so he demonstrates that each translator found authority for his procedure within the text itself. Each translation is also examined in light of Richardson's other writings and placed in its literary and cultural context.

This study uses translations in order to interpret Clarissa, to show how the basis for the novel's reception on the Continent was laid, and to explore the differences and interactions among three literary and cultural systems of the eighteenth century. The close examination of these two important translations enable the formulation of not only a theory of creative vs. preservative translation but also the interconnections between literary theory and translation theory. Beebee also looks at later translations of Clarissa as products of literary and historical change and at Prevostian strategies of the novel.

In his book Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction, Thomas O. Beebee analyzes fictional texts as a "discursive territoriality" that shape readers' notions of (and ambivalence about) national and regional belonging. Several canonical works of literary fiction have provided their readers with verbal maps that in their depictions of boundary spaces construct indirect images of national territory and geography.Beebee analyzes comparatively in their historical and cultural diversity in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's, Nikolai Gogol's, and Ivan Turgenev's competing geographies of Russia and its empire, Euclides da Cunha's ambivalent nomination of the sertanejo (backlander) as the ""bedrock of the Brazilian race,"" William Faulkner's and Jose Lin do Rego's cultural memories of the plantation, Jose Maria Arguedas's novelistic ethnogeographies of Andean culture, Juan Benet's construction of region as both metaphor and metonym for Francoist Spain, and the ""u-topian"" North American (US and Canada) desert landscapes of Mary Austin, Nicole Brossard, and Joy Harjo.