Literary criticism

The Narrators in 'Macbeth'
Barbara Hardy
May 23, 2018

This lecture was originally published by the Institute of English Studies, University of London in 1986.

The Hilda Hulme Memorial Lectures were established in 1985 following a donation from Mr Mohamed Aslam in memory of his wife, Dr Hilda Hulme. The lectures are on the subject of English literature and relate to one of ‘the three fields in which Dr Hulme specialised, namely Shakespeare, language in Elizabethan drama, and the nineteenth-century novel’.

Petrarch’s Famous Men in the Early Renaissance: The Illuminated Copies of Felice Feliciano’s Edition
Lilian Armstrong
December 1, 2016

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) worked over many years on his long historical text about the Lives of ancient Roman military heroes, De viris illustribus (On Famous Men). Left unfinished at his death, the text was completed by 1379 by Petrarch’s colleague, Lombardo della Seta. Within a decade, De viris illustribus was translated into Italian; and in 1476 the Libro degli uomini famosi was printed in Poiano outside of Verona by the eccentric humanist and scribe, Felice Feliciano (1433–1479/1480). The edition includes a peculiar feature: preceding each of the Lives is a page on which is printed an interlace woodcut border within which, however, no image appears.

The present book surveys the...

'mit worten lûter unde glanz': Metapoetics in Konrad von Würzburg’s 'Trojanerkrieg'
Esther Laufer
November 25, 2016
How can you fathom a bottomless abyss? How can you capture ineffable beauty in words? How do you narrate the master of all stories? These are the challenges that  seasoned poet Konrad von Würzburg set himself when at the end of the 13th century he composed his account of the Trojan War from a multitude of sources. 
Konrad has long been recognized as an exceptionally self-conscious author who frequently reflects on the nature, status and function of poetry, and who at times appears more concerned with the sparkling surface of his discourse than with the events he narrates. Taking these observations as a starting point, this study presents the first comprehensive treatment of metapoetics in the Trojanerkrieg....
Society and its Outsiders in the Novels of Jakob Wassermann
Katharina Volckmer
July 1, 2016

Society and its Outsiders in the Novels of Jakob Wassermann takes a fresh look at Wassermann’s depiction of society and its mechanisms of exclusion, specifically those affecting the Jew, the woman, the child and the homosexual man. Wassermann’s extensive oeuvre has not, until now, been considered as an attempt to portray German society at different historical stages, from the Biedermeier to the end of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, this analysis shows how Wassermann’s interest in outsider figures is intertwined with an interest in narrative technique and discusses how his perception of the world affects his depiction of character.

Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France
Edited by Joseph Acquisto, Adrianna M. Paliyenko, and Catherine Witt
October 30, 2015
This volume of essays focuses on how poets approach reading as a notion and a practice that both inform their writing and their relationship to their readers. The nineteenth century saw a broadened and increasingly self-conscious concern with reading as an interpretive and political act, with significant implications for poets' individual practice, which they often forged in dialogue with other poets and artists of the time. Covering the 1830s to the late 1990s, a period rich in poetic innovation, the essays examine a wide range of authors and their diverse approaches to reading as inscribed in - and related to - creative writing, and articulate the many ways in which reading developed as an active engagement key to the critical thought...
From North Africa to France: Family Migration in Text and Film
Isabel Hollis-Touré
March 27, 2015
Over the past four decades immigration to France from the Francophone countries of North Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) has changed in character. For much of the twentieth century, migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to France were men seeking work, who frequently undertook manual labour, working long hours in difficult conditions. Recent decades have seen an increase in family reunification - the arrival of women and children from North Africa, either accompanying their husbands or joining them in France. Contemporary creative representations of migration are shaped by this shift in gender and generation from a solitary, mostly male experience to one that included women and children. Just as the shift made new demands of the '...
Writing and Muslim Identity: Representations of Islam in German and English Transcultural Literature, 1990-2006
Frauke Matthes
February 1, 2012
Writing and Muslim Identity is a comparative study of Islam in contemporary German- and English-language literature. At a time when the non-Islamic world seems to be defining itself increasingly in contrast to the Islamic world, this literary exploration of Islam-related issues sheds new and valuable light on the cultural interaction between the Muslim world and 'the West'. Writing and Muslim Identity engages with literary representations of different versions of Islam and asks how travel and migration, the transcultural experiences of migrant and post-migrant Muslims, may have shaped the Islams encountered in today's Germany and Britain. With its comparative approach to 'cultural translations' as creative and challenging...
Lucian of Samosata Vivus Et Redivivus
Edited by Christopher Ligota and Letizia Panizza
March 1, 2007
The essays in this volume bring together, in a revised and updated form, papers presented at a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in December 1995. As the title suggests, Lucian is considered both in his contemporary environment and in his Nachleben, and the overall purpose is to show the freshness and resilience of the presence in European culture of an author whose well-aimed satirical wit has, from his time to ours, led to defensive attempts at repression and expulsion from the cultural canon. As Kurt Tucholsky put it, nothing was sacred to Lucian, which makes him a 'friend, cousin, brother, comrade at arms'.
Homunculus in the Age of Simulation
Rüdiger Görner
January 1, 1999
Inaugural Lecture delivered on 10 June 1999 at the University of London Senate House.
Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen
Edited by Lothar Huber and Robert C. Conard
January 1, 1997

Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen makes available the papers given at the symposium held at the Institute of Germanic Studies and the Goethe Institute, London, in December 1995, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Böll's death. The articles present new critical perspectives on a writer who is now generally accepted as one of the most important literary figures in Germany during the second half of the twentieth century, and some essays pay particular attention to the hitherto neglected area of Böll's contribution to radio and film, examining the work of a number of renowned directors who have translated his scenarios and characters into the language of the popular mass media.

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