This thesis considers prose texts by the Austrian authors Marlene Streeruwitz and Lilian Faschinger from the viewpoint of intertextuality. The research does not rely on the narrow definitions of intertextuality which are concerned with the appearance of an anterior text in a later text, or on studies of source and influence. Rather my treatment of the novels considers the way meanings are constructed by a network of cultural and social discourses which embody distinct codes, expectations and assumptions. This study discusses the ways in which the chosen texts, through their intertexts, display a postmodern impetus towards reappropriating authorized discourse in new and challenging ways, from feminist perspectives. My intertextual readings are alert to two main threads – the critique of aspects of Austrian society evident in the novels of Streeruwitz and Faschinger and their place within the tradition of Österreich-Beschimpfung, and the interventions into issues pertaining to gender. I examine thematic similarities and differences in the texts, which draw attention to specifically Austrian or gender related issues, as well as scrutinizing formal and linguistic elements. Ultimately, my thesis poses and suggests answers to questions regarding strategies of intervention by feminist authors and the fruitfulness of intertextual readings.

This comparative study of Byron and Goethe seeks to explore the idea that there may be a far more fundamental similarity between the mode of writing of these two poets than has been noted to date. Although there has been, and continues to be, much written about each poet individually there has been little produced on the two poets considered together since the first half of the 20th century - the biographical coincidences and the influence of Goethe's Faust on Byron's Manfred having been exhausted. The initial chapter of this thesis examines this debate before proceeding, in Chapters 2 and 3, to an examination, first of all Goethe's reception of Byron as revealed in his letters, journals, conversations and reviews and then, similarly, to Byron's reception of Goethe. Suspecting that the uniquely aesthetic, vital quality of Byron's and Goethe's poetry may well be the common factor in both, it is an exploration of this 'particularity' that provides the focus in Chapter 4. Having established that there is a fundamental link between Goethe and Byron in their views about art, aesthetics and the function of poetry, it is to close textual analysis of the West-östlicher Divan and Don Juan that I turn in Chapter 5. This close examination illuminates these connections better than any purely theoretical analysis could, and thus appropriately supports Goethe's and Byron's view that the only way to express the particular is precisely through the particular.

This study explores the relationship between female identity formation within patriarchal society and women's literary discourse. The 'Introduction' serves to highlight Lou Andreas-Salomé's and Anaïs Nin's acute awareness of the tradional conflict between the role of artist and the role of woman. With both writers, their efforts to come to terms with their own creative powers involve tentative questions about the function of writing itself, which they both experience as a vital need. Part One of the study, therefore, addresses itself to reflecting the role of language as a basic means of socialization, which produces genderized subjects. This is related to the power of language to enable the construction of identity. Patriarchal culture produces woman as man's complementary Other. Questions of female identity and desire thus gain particular importance for the writer who strives to constitute her identity as autonomous subject. The first two chapters of Part Two focus on the problems that confront the women who, within the process of writing assume creative powers that are traditionally conceived as male prerogatives. The internalized image of woman as mother operates as a powerful impediment to creative self-assertion. An equally fundamental obstacle in the writer's quest for literary authority are the problematic links each writer establishes between a masculinized creator God, paternal authority and cultural discourse. Transcending their culturally induced duality between woman and creator Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin develop opposed literary strategies. Yet both resort to non-threatening female stereotypes that are able to accommodate their anxiety of authorship. Chapters III and IV revolve around the experience of writing itself in terms of a re-construction of inherited meanings and the woman's problem of creating her own meanings. Chapter V concentrates on the gaps that structure either writer's discourse and contribute to making it impossible to establish the woman as subject of desire. Chapter VI explores the ways in which internalized concepts of femininity work to limit the freedom of the imagination, reduce the field of vision and result in projecting transgressive female desires in disguised or displaced form. The 'Conclusion' stresses the inadequacy of existing controversial attitudes to both writers and highlights significant differences between the fiction of Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anaïs Nin.

This thesis examines the contributions of politically engaged writers to the West German peace movement in the final stages of the Cold War. The intensified arms race and related confrontations in the late 1970s and early 1980s were met with a similarly intensified reaction from peace movements in West Germany and beyond, supported by a variety of groups and individuals, including engaged writers. My thesis poses the question of how concepts of political, positional, and moral obligation defined and justified these writers’ public engagement in this period, and furthermore examines what distinct contributions these figures made to the wider West German peace movement based on these obligations. This analysis uses primary materials relating to a range of forms of writers’ engagement in this period, and explores both explicit and implicit forms of obligation supporting the roles and positions taken on by these figures. These include engaged writers’ direct contributions to protest actions, debates concerning the peace movement in the context of writers’ conferences, organisational involvement under the aegis of the Verband deutscher Schriftsteller, and literary engagement through poetry. Although not arguing that engaged writers singlehandedly led or defined peace protests in this period, my thesis demonstrates that these figures played a number of key contributory roles alongside the many other groups and individuals who made up the broader peace movement. These contributions were made with the support of engaged writers’ particular status and expertise, along with more general factors including their shared position as citizens alongside other protesters, with varied forms of obligation playing a key role in defining and justifying these forms of engagement.

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Hartmann von Aue’s \(Gregorius\), Kafka’s \( Die\) \(Verwandlung\) and Thomas Mann’s \(Der\) \(Erwählte\), focusing on their uses of biblical motifs. Connected by pervasive themes of guilt and atonement, each text also relies similarly in its expression of these ideas on the use of images which are familiar from the biblical context, and thus suggest archetypal instances of sin and redemption as points of comparison for the protagonist’s fate. In this way all three texts create a manifest sense of helpless affliction by guilt by implementing echoes of the fate of Adam, both in the relationships of their characters, and in structures of recurring loss, decline and expulsion. Each narrative, moreover, also suggests allusions to the opposing figure of Christ through concurrent echoes of the Passion in its imagery of degradation and exile, and, to varying degrees, through the introduction of complementary images of restoration and rehabilitation drawing on patterns of resurrection. The texts diverge, however, in the way in which they relate these fields of imagery, as the correlation of Fall and redemption which is symbolically affirmed in Hartmann’s narrative, and echoed in Mann’s, is disrupted by Kafka’s introduction of a tragic conclusion.

The thesis explores important similarities and differences between responses to bourgeois society in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). It examines these texts’ presentations of the shifting morality of bourgeois culture, the prevailing sense of paralysis and fragmentation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and compares the authors’ use of allusions to myth, and their explorations of concepts of time. However, by considering the ambivalent responses to bourgeois society as they are presented within these texts, and a selection of Mann and Eliot’s other creative and critical works, the thesis also highlights significant differences in the authors’ responses to bourgeois society, which are indicative of the broader divergent traditions in which they positioned themselves. Eliot subscribes to a tradition based upon the framework of the Christian faith, and the classical literary canon, with an ‘impersonal’ approach to artistic creation. By contrast, Mann places the German ‘burgher’ at the core of the tradition to which he subscribes, emphasising personality, and favouring a humanistic approach, which values the individual’s capacity for ethical judgement based on reason. This framework demonstrates that the thematic similarities and common allusions in Mann and Eliot’s creative works are underscored by radically different authorial approaches and belief systems.

It is undoubtedly one of Kafka's finest erotic scenes – the description of K.'s furtive tryst on the tap-room floor. – Wrapped in Frieda's arms, he rolls back and forth through small puddles of beer and rubbish, her small body burning in his reluctant hands. "Hours passed there," writes Kafka, "hours breathing together with a single heartbeart [gemeinsamen Herzschlags], hours in which K. constantly felt he was lost or had wandered farther into foreign lands [der Fremde] than any human being before him ..." What makes this passage so compelling is the manner in which Kafka, in four short lines, manages to distil everything ambiguous and terrifying about the erotic relation into a scene which, otherwise, could almost pass for sentimental.

This study seeks to identify a coalition of philosophy and literature in the work of Franz Kafka, and begins with a grounding of his output in the philosophical context from which it emerged. This relatively under-researched philosophical backdrop consists in Kafka's study, at university and in a discussion group, of philosophical positions derived from the "descriptive psychology" of Franz Brentano. Kafka was hence conversant with several philosophical agendas, notably those of logic, Gestalt psychology, and a nascent form of phenomenology, which all derived their impetus from Brentano's work. The initial issue, therefore, is that of assessing the extent of a purported influence of such theories on Kafka's texts. What emerges as a "strategy" of Kafka's work is the aesthetic exploitation of such positions; a tactic which constitutes an almost parodistic subversion of these early forms of phenomenological thought. Thus on the one hand it is implied that the narrative technique of Kafka's work, and in particular the representation of consciousness and its "world", is derived from Brentanian thought, and on the other that this influence is modulated in a specific direction, which renders these texts so singularly amenable to post-structuralist thought. My project consequently proceeds to examine the post-structuralist response to Kafka while juxtaposing this analysis with the grounding of his work in proto-phenomenology. Central to this stage of the study are Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, and the scrutiny of their perspectives will be organized by the themes of authorship, interpretation, power, and desire. The exploration of the "deconstructive" standpoint, represented primarily through Blanchot and Derrida, will be guided by an account of why such a stance seems to be accommodated so readily by Kafka's work, and also of the extent to which his texts could be said, on the basis of the influence of Brentanian thought, to resist such appropriation.

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The aim of this thesis is to present the fundamental philosophical positions of Early German Romanticism, focusing on the three following writers: J. C. F. Holderlin, Novalis, and F. Schlegel. Chapter 1 begins with an examination of the first-philosophical, or ontological foundations of Romanticism and discusses its appropriation and critique of the work of Fichte, arriving at an elucidation of Romantic ontology as an ontology of differencing and production. The second chapter looks at how epistemology is transformed, in the hands of the Romantics, and due to the attention they paid to language, semiotic theory, and the operations of irony in discourse, into poetology - a theory of knowledge, into a theory of poetic production. In the third chapter a confrontation between the philosophical positions of Romanticism and those of the main currents of German Idealism (Schelling, Hegel) is undertaken; through this confrontation, the essential trait of Romantic thought is arrived at, namely the thought of an incomplete Absolute, as opposed to the absolute as totality in Idealism. The final chapter considers the avenue left open by the notion of the incomplete Absolute, and the Romantics' chief legacy, namely the theory of literature; literature is thus seen as coextensive with philosophy, and analysed under three conceptual categories (the theory of genre, the fragment, criticism) which all betray their provenance from the thought lying at the core of Romanticism: the incomplete Absolute. Finally, in the conclusion a summation of this exposition of romanticism is presented, alongside a brief consideration of the relevance of the Romantic project in contemporary critical/philosophical debates.