Bithell Series of Dissertations
January 1, 1995
This long-awaited
edition brings together for the first time 366 letters, cards and telegrams
exchanged between Craig and his patron the cosmopolitan Count Kessler. An
important primary source, illuminated by Dr Newman's commentary, it focuses on
three areas of particular importance:- 1. Craig's artistic ideas and the spread
of his influence through exhibitions and books; proposals are developed for
work with Otto Brahm, Eleonora Duse, Max Reinhardt, Henry van de Velde, Eduard
Verkade, Leopold Jessner, Dyaghilev, Beerbohm Tree, C. B. Cochran, and others.
2. Kessler's Cranach Press Hamlet
with wood-engraved illustrations by Craig; this is a landmark in the history of
twentieth-century book design and printing whose genesis is now fully...
July 2, 1993
This study of Gottfried von Straßburg discusses the narrative technique of
the romance of Tristan (c. 1210) against the double background of
Latin rhetoric and poetics on the one hand and the developing written
vernacular tradition on the other. It argues that Gottfried's poetics represent
the attempt to mediate between opposing tendencies in vernacular narrative, the
one historiographic and archival, the other fictional and experimental; the
Tristan romance is the fictional treatment of a traditional story whose
foundations Gottfried considers to be historical. Central to this experiment
with history is a concept of verisimilitude that is developed in rhetoric and
especially in grammarians' commentaries on Lucan, who in the Middle Ages...
January 13, 1992
Brigid Haines focuses on the crucial interplay between dialogue and
narrative in Adalbert Stifter's works and relates this to their overall
structure. Stifter, a conservative and often didactic writer, is nevertheless
shown to present a complex view of reality which incorporates subjective and
sometimes subversive voices. In Der beschriebene Tännling the
characters' utterances relativize the narrator's apparently objective account,
while in the Bildungsroman Der Nachsommer one subjective voice
succeeds in calling into question the validity of the tightly-woven rhetorical
creed on which the novel is based. Stifter achieved a more open form in his
final novel, Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters, which articulates honestly
his own doubts about the...
November 13, 1991
This study sets out to challenge the usual approach to the question of
Hölderlin's response to Christ, which focuses on no more than two or three late
hymns, by tracing, through each major stage of Hölderlin's work, a series of
latent christological debates. These debates, in which philosophy, theology,
and poetry converge, represent Hölderlin's engagement with the urgent
intellectual issues of his day. Dr Ogden offers a detailed account of the
matrix of competing ideas in the famous Tübingen seminary and radical
re-readings of his novel Hyperion and the dramatic fragments on the
Empedokles theme before discussing the climax of Hölderlin's response to Christ
in 'Friedensfeier' and other contemporary poems. It will be of interest not
just...
January 14, 1991
This book undertakes a comparative reassessment of psychosexual concerns in
the works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil. The two authors, so different in
other respects, are shown to converge in their coordinated treatment of the problematics
of sense and sensuality. In either case a narcissistic ideal of androgynous
union with the sister as 'Doppelgänger im anderen Geschlecht' is set up, only
to be revoked by the compulsive return to incestuous violence and inner
division. By disrupting the quest for poetic and discursive sense, sexual
antagonism operates at once as the prime mover in the more general crisis of
selfhood as the prime stumbling-block for the pursuit of aesthetic ends in
either oeuvre.
November 9, 1989
Colin Riordan finds the key to Uwe Johnson's puzzling works in an
idiosyncratic moral code to which both Johnson and his narrative figures
adhere. This code underlies the development in Johnson's prose from his first
novel Ingrid Babendererde (written 1956, published 1985), through Mutmaßungen
über Jakob (1959), Das dritte Buch über Achim (1961) and Zwei
Ansichten (1965), to the four-volume masterpiece Jahrestage. Aus dem
Leben von Gesine Cresspahl (1970-83). The complex narrative of Jahrestage
is unravelled, revealing the problems Gesine Cresspahl encounters in
reconstructing her past. These problems can only be solved by evolving a code
of narrative ethics which forces Gesine - and the reader - to confront the
kinds of painful truths...
April 1, 1987
Hugo Ball (1886-1927) is one of the most enigmatic figures of the Modernist
generation. After an initial immersion in the thought of Nietzsche, he became
intensely involved in avant-garde Expressionism, was attracted to Futurism,
founded Dada and turned towards political journalism, only then to turn his
back on the modern world and retreat into highly-structured Roman Catholic orthodoxy.
This study neither attempts to reconcile Ball's earlier, 'anarchistic' life
with his later, gnostic, Roman Catholicism, nor does it concentrate solely on
his Dada years (1916-1917) to the neglect of what preceded and succeeded them.
Instead, it attempts to look at Ball's life and works as a whole and to show
how the works point...
January 1, 1987
This study proposes an important revision of the textbook view of Klopstock
as a pre-Romantic figure; it emphasizes the continuity of his thought with that
of the classical tradition. Drawing in part on unpublished sources, Dr Hilliard
demonstrates the thoroughly humanist cast of Klopstock's reflections on the
arts and sciences, both in the priorities he establishes and the specific arguments
he uses, which are largely derived from a fund of rhetorical commonplaces. The
author also indicates the importance of these commonplaces for Klopstock's poetic
theory and for the poetic works themselves. This study will thus be of particular
interest as a contribution to the growing literature on rhetoric in the eighteenth...
September 1, 1986
Dr Waller seeks to assemble the best available criticism of literary Expressionism
and to measure the work of five poets against the assumption that particular
merits may have been submerged beneath a generalized onslaught on the movement.
The criticisms of a series of distinguished writers are examined: their central
concern is reflected in their repeated invocation of 'reality', and it emerges
that the question of the Expressionists' responsibility (or lack of responsibility)
as makers of poetic forms has its precise analogy in the question of their political
responsibility. Dr Waller investigates the validity of the claim (made, for
example, by the Marxists) that a direct connexion can be established between...
January 1, 1986
This study has a two-fold purpose: to approach and describe the European historical
novel afresh, and to evaluate German historical fiction alongside its European
counterparts. Dr Humphrey's new approach is through analytical and substantive
philosophy of history. This both places the historical novel within a history
of history and shows to what type of (hi)story - to what events, timescales,
causation and agency, locations, casts, themes and motifs - the genre inclines.
Subsequently, German historical fiction is portrayed in its dual aspect: the
historical Novelle, much-cultivated but undemocratic and ahistorical in tendency,
is contrasted with the wrongly neglected historical novels of Alexis, Fontane
and...