Institute of Germanic Studies Publications

London German Studies XVII: Smell and Social Life
Edited by Katharina Herold and Frank Krause
November 18, 2021
Literary references to smell in social contexts have a long tradition. However, the significant contribution of odour imagery to our moods and emotions goes largely unnoticed, which accounts for the comparatively late attention paid to smell in research into the significance of sensory images in literature. The well-known capacity of smell motifs to affirm and disrupt social and aesthetic norms cuts across historical periods, but the ways in which specific literary-historical periods renew motifs of smell in social life have remained underexplored. This volume, based on the interdisciplinary conference that took place in November 2018 at the University of London's Institute of Modern Languages Research, gives an overview of such...
London German Studies XVI: Pacifist and Anti-Militarist Writing in German, 1889-1928
Edited by Andreas Kramer and Ritchie Robertson
December 1, 2018
Historical research has dispelled a number of myths surrounding Word War I: whereas the outbreak of war was greeted by the urban middle classes with frenzied enthusiasm, in working-class areas and smaller towns the mood was more of foreboding. Little attention has so far been paid to those who opposed the war and its underlying culture of militarism, though opposition to war and militarism has a distinguished German pedigree. This volume explores opposition to war and militarism among a range of German-language authors in a period roughly defined by two international bestsellers: Suttner’s 'Die Waffen nieder' (1889) and Remarque’s 'Im Westen nichts Neues' (1928). Major figures (Kraus, Schnitzler, Zweig) have not lacked...
London German Studies XV: The Window. Motif and Topos in Austrian, German and Swiss Art and Literature
Edited by Heide Kunzelmann and Anne Simon
May 16, 2016
Windows - those thinner patches in the external skins of buildings that function as both barrier and channel between the individual and the outside world. They structure the facades of buildings and hence our everyday environment. They display articles of desire, technological progress and economic growth and so reveal new departures in style, aspiration and attitudes to the individual. Through the built environment in which we live, windows even function as building blocks of our personal identity. This volume illustrates how an item so central to our everyday life comes to govern aesthetic discourses concerned with openness and knowledge. It also identifies how, in the German cultural context, the literature, art and architecture of...
Protest and Reform in German Literature and Visual Culture, 1871-1918
Edited by Charlotte Woodford and Godela Weiss-Sussex
January 17, 2015
Around 1900, progressive responses to the bourgeois conservatism of the nineteenth century coexist with anti-modern capitalism and industrialization. Both give rise to protests against the status quo and generate a plethora of demands for cultural and social reform, in which elements of 'radicalism' and 'traditionalism' are often hard to separate. Exploring the concepts of modernity championed in the modernist avant-garde as well as in less formally experimental guises, the essays collected here provide insights into the artistic expressions of protest discourses of the era and into the imaginative constructions of alternative social worlds. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from the programmatic visions of artists' colonies...
London German Studies XIV: The Reception of Classical Antiquity in German Literature
Edited by Anne Simon and Katie Fleming
August 1, 2013
This volume, based on a series of lectures co-organised by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies in 2011 und 2012, examines the enduring relevance of Classical material, its openness to multi-layered readings and its use to express contemporary concerns, in other words, its re-presentation, or making present, in German literature. The essays in this volume, which range from the Middle Ages to the present and deal with genres as diverse as poetry and comic books, epigrams and novels, signal that one reason for the enduring relevance of Classical myth lies in its fluidity: its canonicity lends authority but is supple enough to allow adaptation to forms that speak most potently to a given age...
Beyond Glitter and Doom: The Contingency of the Weimar Republic
Edited by Jochen Hung and Godela Weiss-Sussex
July 1, 2012
The Weimar Republic has received more attention in academic research and popular culture than almost any other period in German history. Nevertheless, its prevailing historical image remains surprisingly simplistic: it is often seen as an era of accelerated cultural progress on the one hand and extreme political unrest, social upheaval and economic crisis on the other, a view epitomized in the ubiquitous image of the ‘dance on the volcano’. This volume aims to move the discussion beyond this limited dichotomy. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from Weimar’s legal framework to musical theatre, challenging hitherto accepted views in their respective fields. Despite their thematic range and differences in approach, the...
The Nameable and the Unnameable. Hofmannsthal's 'Der Schwierige' Revisited
Edited by Martin Liebscher, Christophe Fricker, and Robert von Dassanowsky
June 1, 2011
This volume presents a comprehensive, inter-disciplinary re-evaluation of Hofmannsthal's most successful play and, more widely, on his contribution to literary modernity and its aftermath . Der Schwierige marks Hofmannsthal's attempt to depict and overcome the language crisis he himself recognized in the 'Letter' to Lord Chandos. Written between 1909 and 1920, the play reflects Hofmannsthal's experience of the atrocities of war, unnameable but constantly present behind the chatter in the Viennese salons. The volume looks at the relationship between poetological and poetic texts, and sheds new light on the position of Der Schwierige in Hofmannsthal's work. Contributions address central motifs of the play (community,...
London German Studies XIII: From Charlottenburg to Middleton
Edited by Joyce Crick, Martin Liebscher, and Martin Swales
January 1, 2010

Derived from a symposium at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies in Michael Hamburger’s memory, this volume explores his poetry and creative prose, his translations, the ‘person’ and his world. His scholarly writing was one element in his work, his jargon-free criticism retaining an undiminished urgency, freshness and vital literacy. His poetry ranges itself against the tracks and mechanisms of monstrous order, and seeks to mark out a territory where some kind of value can be disclosed, both within and beyond the poetry. As a translator, Hamburger asks the reader to hear between the lines of English poetry the German text, the text that stretches the length and changes the rhythm of the English sentence. These...

Alfred Döblin: Paradigms of Modernism
Edited by Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield
December 30, 2009

Döblin's texts, which range widely across contemporary discourses, are paradigms of the encounter between literary and scientific modernity. With their use of 'Tatsachenphantasie', they explode conventional language, seeking a new connection with the world of objects and things. This volume reassesses and re-evaluates the uniquely interdisciplinary quality of Döblin's interdiscursive, factually-inspired poetics by offering challenging new perspectives on key works. The volume analyses not only some of Döblin's best-known novels and stories, but also neglected works including his early medical essays, political journalism and autobiographical texts. Other topics addressed are Döblin's engagement with German history; his...

'Not an Essence but a Positioning': German-Jewish Women Writers (1900-1938)
Edited by Andrea Hammel and Godela Weiss-Sussex
June 11, 2009

This volume explores the relationship between identity - understood not as an essence, but rather a positioning - and the work of German-Jewish women authors. The period 1900-1938 provided them with a wide range of possible self-identifications, both between Jewish tradition (or 'Jewish renaissance') and acculturation, and between a traditional and modern understanding of the position of women. By examining their texts in the historical and literary contexts in which they were written, the analyses in this book reveal traditions and positions that are not necessarily communicated directly by the German-Jewish authors themselves. The volume contributes a major contribution to the understanding of writers who have largely been...

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