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The almost complete disregard of the verse epic as a genre still worthy of meaningful discussion and earnest investigation is all too apparent in German literary criticism. The only attempt to view the genre in its evolution through the centuries is Heinrich Maiworm's valuable but necessarily somewhat perfunctory historical survey of the German epic which appeared in the second volume of Deutsche Philologie im Auf,iss. There is as yet, however, no literary study of the German verse epic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period which is of particular interest to such a study and indeed crucial to the genre itself, since it was during this period that the novel claimed its final and apparently irrevocable victory over its predecessor, a form which had once been hallowed but was now declared a dead genre. It is not the lack of sufficient material that could explain this neglect, for in terms of sheer quantity and, we believe, not quantity alone, there is enough material for more than one study. The prime purpose of this work, then, is to attempt, if not to fill this conspicuous gap, at least to begin narrowing it somewhat, and in so doing to determine in how far the continuing existence of this vacuum in German literary appreciation is in fact justified.
This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s. While mock-heroic poetry is a parodistic counterpart to serious epic, mock-epic poetry starts by parodying epic but moves on to much wider and richer literary explorations; it relies heavily on intertextual allusion to other works, on narratorial irony, on the sympathetic and sometimes libertine presentation of sexual relatons, and on a range of satirical devices. It includes well-known texts (Pope's Dunciad, Byron's Don Juan, Heine's Atta Troll) and others which are little known (Ratschky's Melchior Striregel, Parny's La Guerre des Dieux). It owes a marked debt to Italian romance epic (especially Ariosto). The study places these texts in the literary context of the decline of serious epic, which helped mock epic to flourish, and of the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' which questioned the authority of Homer's and Virgil's epics; and it relates their substance to contemporary debates about questions of religion and gender.
Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.
In interpreting its own age art often turns to the past. At the beginning of the twentieth century one of these encounters between present and past was prompted by the interest a major figure in German modernism, the sculptor Ernst Barlach, came to take in the medieval epic The Song of the Nibelungen. There exists no statement by Barlach to explain what prompted his interest and the resulting sequence of large drawings on the epic’s climactic final segment, reproduced here. In conception and execution these drawings stand out in Barlach’s graphic oeuvre, as they stand apart from the multitude of interpretations the Nibelungen inspired in art, literature, and music. This book discusses the epic and its course through German history, the artist’s biography and the course of his work, as well as the place the drawings occupy in the art, culture, and politics of Germany in the 1920s and 30s and beyond to the ideological and political crises of Central Europe before and after the First World War.
Since the 1990s, the short story has re-emerged in the German-speaking world as a vibrant literary genre, serving as a medium for both literary experimentation and popular forms. Authors like Judith Hermann and Peter Stamm have had a significant impact on German-language literary culture and, in translation, on literary culture in the UK and USA. This volume analyzes German-language short-story writing in the twenty-first century, aiming to establish a framework for further research into individual authors as well as key themes and formal concerns. An introduction discusses theories of the short-story form and literary-aesthetic questions. A combination of thematic and author-focused chapters then discuss key developments in the contemporary German-language context, examining performance and performativity, Berlin and crime stories, and the openendness, fragmentation, liminality, and formal experimentations that characterize short stories in the twenty-first century. Together the chapters present the rich field of short-story writing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, offering a variety of theoretical approaches to individual stories and collections, as well as exploring connections with storytelling, modernist short prose, and the novella. The volume concludes with a survey of broad trends, and three original translations exemplifying the breadth of contemporary German-language short-story writing.
Medieval literature is to a large degree shaped by orality, not only with regard to performance, but also to transmission and composition. Although problems of orality have been much discussed by medievalists, there is to date no comprehensive handbook on this topic. ‘Medieval Oral Literature’, a volume in the ‘De Gruyter Lexikon’ series, was written by an international team of twenty-five scholars and offers a thorough discussion of theoretical approaches as well as detailed presentations of individual traditions and genres. In addition to chapters on the oral-formulaic theory, on the interplay of orality and writing in the Early Middle Ages, on performance and performers, on oral poetics and on ritual aspects of orality, there are chapters on the Older Germanic, Romance, Middle High German, Middle English, Celtic, Greek-Byzantine, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Turkish traditions of oral literature. There is a special focus on epic and lyric, genres that are also discussed in separate chapters, with additional chapters on the ballad and on drama.