Download Free German Expressionist Prose Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online German Expressionist Prose and write the review.

An extreme sensitivity to gathering social crisis, an accompanying angry enthusiasm for artistic experimentation and renewal – this compelling mix in German art, poetry, and drama of the period 1910 to 1925 continues to draw both scholarly attention and intense popular interest. In this book Augustinus Dierick focuses on another significant but hitherto neglected medium of German Expressionist thought – short narrative prose – in order to illuminate and evaluate the contribution of that genre to one of the twentieth century's most powerful artistic movements. Dierick's study includes a thorough analysis of the works of a broad range of Expressionist prose writers, from those of such specialists in the genre as Edschmid, Heym, Benn, Loerke, Frank, Sternheim, Ehrenstein, and 'Mynona' to the shorter prose works of such major figures as Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann, Max Brod, and Franz Werfel. Dierick isolates the thematic obsessions common among Expressionist writers: the pathos of the self in confrontation with nature and with God, the tension between self and the institutions of bourgeois society, and the attractions and dangers of eroticism. Throughout Dierick stresses the interrelationship between themes and their formal expression. He examines many apparent excesses in style and tone, many aberrations in structure and generic characteristics, and identifies them not as needless experimentation but as a necessary result of the attempt to find appropriate forms for extreme situations and complex ideas. Dierick's analysis makes clear that Expressionist prose has an intrinsic artistic value and, because of certain nuances and different accents, must be included in any estimation of the nature and importance of Expressionism as a whole.
New essays examining the complex period of rich artistic ferment that was German literary Expressionism.
Ulrich Weisstein's collection of 21 essays offers a comparative study of Expressionism as a Modernist movement whose dynamic core lay in Germany and Austria-Hungary, but which transformed artistic practices in other European countries. The focus, Weisstein argues, “must be strictly and sharply aimed at a specific body of works and opinions—a relatively dense core surrounded by a less clearly defined fringe zone—indigenous to the German speaking countries.” The volume spans an “Expressionist” period extending from roughly 1910 to 1925. Weisstein himself contributes two introductory chapters on problems of definition and a thoughtful analysis of English Vorticism. An ample context is set by comparative essays concerned with international movements such as Futurism that had an impact on German Expressionist drama, prose, and poetry, together with essays on the adaptation of Expressionist forms in countries such as Poland, Russia, Hungary, South Slavic nations and the United States. These essays call attention to representative authors and artists, as well as to periodicals and artistic circles. Reviewers have praised not only the presentation of “literary links and interaction” among national cultures, but especially the “most rewarding” interdisciplinary essays on Dada and on Expressionist painting, music, and film.
This book reads messianic expectation as the defining characteristic of German culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. It has long been accepted that the Expressionist movement in Germany was infused with a thoroughly messianic strain. Here, with unprecedented detail and focus, that strain is traced through the work of four important Expressionist playwrights: Ernst Barlach, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller and Franz Werfel. Moreover, these dramatists are brought into new and sustained dialogues with the theorists and philosophers of messianism who were their contemporaries: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem. In arguing, for example, that concepts like Bloch’s utopian self-encounter (Selbstbegegnung) and Benjamin’s messianic now-time (Jetztzeit) reappear as the framework for Expressionism’s staging of collective redemption in a new age, Anderson forges a previously underappreciated link in the study of Central European thought in the early twentieth century.
This collection, for the first time, explores women’s self-conceptions and representations of women’s and gender roles in society in their own Expressionist works. How did women approach themes commonly considered to be characteristic of the Expressionist movement, and did they address other themes or aesthetics and styles not currently represented in the canon? Women in German Expressionism centers its analysis on gender, together with difference, ethnicity, intersectionality, and identity, to approach artworks and texts in more nuanced ways, engaging solidly established theoretical and sociohistorical approaches that enhance and update our understanding of the material under investigation. It moves beyond the masculine, “New Man,” viewpoint so firmly associated with German Expressionism and examines alternative, critical, and divergent interpretations of the changing world at the time. This collection seeks to broaden the theorization, scholarship, and reception of German Expressionism by—much belatedly—including works by women, and by shifting or redefining firmly established concepts and topics carrying only the imprint of male authors and artists to this day.
Designed to provide English readers of German literature the opportunity to familiarize themselves with both the established canon and newly emerging literatures that reflect the concerns of women and ethnic minorities, the Encyclopedia of German Literature includes more than 500 entries on writers, individual work, and topics essential to an understanding of this rich literary tradition. Drawing on the expertise of an international group of experts, the essays in the encyclopedia reflect developments of the latest scholarship in German literature, culture, and history and society. In addition to the essays, author entries include biographies and works lists; and works entries provide information about first editions, selected critical editions, and English-language translations. All entries conclude with a list of further readings.
This is the first book to describe German literary history up to the unification of Germany in 1990. It takes a fresh look at the main authors and movements, and also asks what Germans in a given period were actually reading and writing, what they would have seen at the local theatre or found in the local lending library; it includes, for example, discussions of literature in Latin as well as in German, eighteenth-century letters and popular novels, Nazi literature and radio plays, and modern Swiss and Austrian literature. A new prominence is given to writing by women. Contributors, all leading scholars in their field, have re-examined standard judgements in writing a history for our own times. The book is designed for the general reader as well as the advanced student: titles and quotations are translated, and there is a comprehensive bibliography.
A collection of vital autobiographical pre-WWI prose from the great German-Jewish writer Never before translated into English, this trio of works finds one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century mythologizing her own pursuit of freedom in captivatingly original fiction. In The Peter Hille Book (1906), Else Lasker-Schüler offers an elegy for her arch-bohemian mentor. But this hypnotic blend of Nietzsche, fairy tale and paganism also celebrates the one Hille called 'Tino'--the author herself--and the electrifying uncertainties of the creative life. In the 1907 text The Nights of Tino of Baghdad she sends her alter ego on a heady voyage through an imagined 'Orient'. From the banks of the Nile the narrative advances across a wide emotional landscape, using Muslim and Jewish motifs to explore the commonalities of Semitic identity. Finally, Lasker-Schüler's avatar encounters dervishes, biblical figures and a 20-year-old foetus in The Prince of Thebes. Issued on the eve of World War One, this sequence of dark fables seethes with violence and eroticism, culminating in a great clash of civilizations in which Tino leads the charge. An insightful afterword details the genesis of these Three Prose Works in the context of the author's tumultuous life. Fiction.
German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage considers the powerfully stylized, anti-realistic styles of acting on the German Expressionist stage from 1916 to 1921. It relates this striking departure from the dominant European acting tradition of realism to the specific cultural crises that enveloped the German nation during the course of its involvement in World War I. This book describes three distinct Expressionist acting styles, all of which in their own ways attempted to show how symbolic stage performance could be a powerful rhetorical resource for a culture struggling to come to terms with the crises of historical change. The examination of Expressionist script and actor memoirs allows for an unprecedented focus on description and analysis of acting itself.