Relations Stop Nowhere : The Common Literary Foundations of German and American Literature 1830-1917.
Title:
Relations Stop Nowhere : The Common Literary Foundations of German and American Literature 1830-1917.
Author:
Ridley, Hugh.
ISBN:
9789401204231
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (318 pages)
Series:
Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 109 ; v.v. 109
Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 109
Contents:
Contents -- Preface -- PART ONE: GERMAN AND AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY -- Chapter 1: Introduction to National Literatures -- Nations needed National Literature -- Germany and the USA as Latecomers -- Unpromising Beginnings -- Chapter 2: The Early Years of German and American Literary History -- The Early Campaign for a National Literature in America -- Literary History and Nature -- Chapter 3: Literary History and Democratic Nation Building -- Literary History and Real History -- German Aspirations for America -- Post-1848 Reconsiderations of Real History -- The Politics of Cultural Despair -- Chapter 4: Democracy and Realism -- The Failure of Realism -- American Nineteenth Century Realism -- Looking for American Realism after Matthiesen -- The Later Search for Realism in Germany -- American Literature Viewed after the Empire -- Chapter 5: Hunting for American Aesthetics -- Denying the Critical Tradition -- Genre -- Excursus: Fontane and Emerson -- More Considerations of Genre: The Romance -- Final Thoughts: Aesthetics and Religion -- Chapter 6: Exclusions from the Canon -- Popular Literature -- Women in the Two Literary Histories -- Chapter 7: Literary History and Anthropology -- Literature and Anthropology from the Early Days -- Volkskunde -- Kultur and Zivilisation -- The Last Twenty Years -- PART TWO: THE MID-ATLANTIC SPACE -- Chapter 8: The American Heart of Darkness: Charles Sealsfield and the West -- The Prairie on the Jacinto River -- Sealsfield and American Literature -- Out of Civilization -- European or American Themes? -- The Lesson of the Frontier -- History: A Democratic Order in the Making -- Chapter 9: American Idylls beyond Buffalo Bill -- At the foot of the rainbow - Utopian thought -- Exotics Away From Home -- The Primitive Without Violence -- Mr Beissel and the Primitives -- Mann and Whitman.
Chapter 10: Emerson in the German and American Traditions -- Weimar, Concord and Naumburg -- History -- The Avoidance of Tragedy and the Novel -- Modern Reassessments -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.
Abstract:
This book attempts for the first time a comparative literary history of Germany and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its material does not come from the familiar overlaps of individual German and American writers, but from the work of the literary historians of the two countries after 1815, when American intellectuals took Germany as a model for their project to create an American national literature. The first part of the book examines fundamental structural affinities between the two literary histories and the common problems these caused, especially in questions of canon, realism, aesthetics and in the marginalization of popular and women's writing. In the second part, significant figures whose work straddle the two literatures - from Sealsfield and Melville, Whitman and Thomas Mann to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bellow - are discussed in detail, and the arguments of the first part are shown in their relevance to understanding major writers. This book is not merely comparative in scope: it shows that only international comparison can explain the course of American literary history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. As recent developments in American Studies explore the multi-cultural and 'hybrid' nature of the American tradition, this book offers evidence of the dependencies which linked American and German national literary history.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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