The thesis compares the values and attitudes promoted in the fiction of five authors associated with the 'Heimatkunst' movement. The introduction attempts a definition of the term 'Heimatkunst' and then proceeds to an examination of the theoretical writings of Adolf Bartels and Friedrich Lienhard, indicating the often considerable differences in attitude between the two critics and outlining such common ground as they share with each other and the "practitioners of the movement treated in this study. The thesis then moves to an analysis of single novels, where necessary relating these works to their authors' other writings. The novels chosen for analysis are Wilhelm von Polenz' Der Büttnerbauer, Adolf Bartels' Die Dithmarscher, Gustav Frenssen's Jörn Uhl, Ludwig Ganghofer's Der hohe Schein and Hermann Löns's Der Wehrwolf. These analyses confirm the existence of that common ground between the authors outlined in the introduction - their veneration of rural life and their suspicion of urban culture and values, their anti- intellectual bias, nationalist or racialist sympathies and their belief that contemporary ills may be cured or ameliorated by a return to the pre-industrial, nature-based values of the rural community. The manner, degree and consistency with which they commit themselves to these attitudes and views vary and there are certain preoccupations common to only some of the authors dealt with, although even these differing concerns can often be related to individual interpretations of shared premises. The thesis concludes with an examination of common stylistic and technical features of their fiction and the literary devices employed to direct the reader's sympathies.

Goethe had a complex and evolving relationship with the nobility, for reasons which can in part be inferred from his biography. This thesis, however, is primarily concerned with examination of relevant texts, and is largely confined to the years before the journey to Italy in 1786. The first three chapters cover the period before his arrival in Weimar. This is followed by an account of the relevant works from the first Weimar decade (1775-1786), with some biographical detail. The main weight has fallen on Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung, a text which is still sometimes undervalued, and has a rather limited bibliography. It is naturally a more direct reflection of his social attitudes than the three major plays associated with the decade, which however have been given separate, more cursory treatments in the three final chapters. General themes include the emergence of Goethe from immature, or at least inherited, stereotypes of the nobility, first towards an attempted alliance between it and the ‘Genie’ of the Sturm und Drang, and then to a more detailed critique made possible by personal experience. The final phase (final, that is, within the limited time frame) was the formation and development of an internal ideal of nobility with an increasingly tenuous relationship with social and political reality. Goethe’s picture of nobility as performance and presentation of self is considered, and its links, for the non-noble author, with theatre and theatrical role performance. Other recurring themes include court manners and their value, both inherently and as an analogue of the heightening which for Goethe was essential to art, court life as a paradigm of social life in general, and the related subject of flight from society.

My thesis investigates the relationship between literary modernism and modernist theology, discussing the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Józef Wittlin in the context of the theological debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I aim to establish parallels between contemporary theologians’ and religious thinkers’ attempts to rethink Christianity’s place in modernity and the poetic explorations of similar issues in the works of Rilke, Eliot, and Wittlin. The first chapter of my thesis discusses the debates surrounding the so-called ‘Modernist crisis’ in the Roman Catholic Church, in which two different visions of Catholicism – the neo-scholastic orthodoxy and the progressive Modernism – came into conflict. In the following years, similar disputes took place in the Church of England and the American Presbyterian Church. Thinkers associated with the ‘Modernist’ understanding of Christianity considered it necessary to develop a new apologetic that would be capable of responding to contemporary philosophy and recent developments in psychology and science. They drew attention to the value of personal experience and individual conscience, began reclaiming the mystical traditions of the past, and became increasingly interested in the psychology of religious experience. In the three literary chapters of my thesis, I argue that the reconceptualisation of the relationship between the religious experience of contemporary Christians and the inherited doctrinal tradition – central to Modernist theologians’ attempts to reconcile Christianity with the critical project of modernity – is also at the heart of the poetic projects of Rilke, Eliot, and Wittlin. I argue that Rilke’s engagement with Orthodox iconography, Eliot’s investment in the search for the meaning of mystical experience and its relation to Christian dogma, and Wittlin’s reinterpretation of traditional hagiography are all attempts at reinterpreting medieval Christian traditions and reconceptualising their place in modernity. Their parallel poetic explorations of the relationship between Christianity and modernity, I argue, demonstrate the existence of a complex network of interactions and exchanges between theological and cultural modernisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

No description available.

Alfred Döblin’s famous 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has often been discussed in terms of the appropriation of film poetics by the medium of literature and is said to abound with examples of literary montage. In most post-war discussions of literary montage in Berlin Alexanderplatz, however, the device is regularly understood as an umbrella term for anything of stylistic interest. Deploying 1920s and 1930s literary and film criticism I demonstrate that this regularly leads to anachronisms and terminological over-inflation. I thus offer a historically informed definition of literary montage in precise narratological, stylistic and experiential categories. Montage rests on the identification of intradiegetically unmotivated ready-mades and the perceived experiential similarities between the novel, Soviet montage films, and Dadaist photomontage. The lack of motivation affords the experience of disruption which, I demonstrate, has within the Benjaminian “modernity thesis” too often been extrapolated to characterize all film editing. My analysis shows that contemporary critics regularly discriminated between different types of editing on at least three experiential axes – tempo and dynamism, confusion, and disruption. My proposed definition of literary montage thus also allows me to analyse the novel in terms of the key narratological novelties that literary montage introduces: the global proliferation of heterodiegetic zero-level narrators accompanied with the local elimination of zerolevel narrators altogether. In other words, Döblin accomplishes in literary fiction what holds for film fiction in general – the absence of a narrator held to be fictionally in control of the whole of the text. Conversely, through the use of intertitles and the particular type of voice-over interjections, Fassbinder’s adaptation endeavours to emulate the reciprocal commonplace of literary fiction – the narrator’s continuous presence. Paired with Fassbinder’s film, Jutzi’s adaptation demonstrates how visual and sound film montage both differ from literary montage. Whereas literary montage hinges on disruptive stylistic shifts, film montage rests on disruptive spatio-temporal dislocation.

Scholarly interest in travel literature has increased substantially in recent years. However, there has been a lack of sustained, cohesive commentary on the journey motif in German Romantic culture, particularly its origins and manifestations in literature and philosophy. My doctoral research fills this gap through a philosophically- and historically-informed reading of German Romanticism. The thesis examines 1) the paradigmatic template of the literary journey established by Goethe in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 2) metaphors of movement and mobility within the Idealist philosophy of Kant and Fichte and their role, 3) the manner in which these metaphors migrate into the theoretical and prose writings of Novalis, 4) Tieck’s notion of the sublime and its relevance for the Romantic journey, and 5) the late Romantic satirization of the journey motif within Eichendorff’s prose. Additionally, the thesis serves to show how philosophical discourse of the Enlightenment had reached something of an impasse in its use of the journey motif, with the subject unable to evolve and renew itself beyond the strictures of particular models of subjective cognition. The Romantics thought literary practice was to supersede philosophy and it was mobility in the form of the journey as both metaphor and process, which helped bring about this transition and created a flexible self-authoring and self- renewing model of the subject. The study also recounts a particular history of Romanticism which charts, via the history of the journey, the movement’s youthful idealism, the fear of the pitfalls of human subjectivity, and its eventual self-distanciation through parody.

This thesis examines the role(s) played by German writers as cultural ambassadors after the First World War, at a time when culture was seen as increasingly important in Germany’s international relations. It focuses on the development and activities of the German branch of the International PEN Club and the international engagement of four writers from across Weimar Germany’s cultural and political spectrum: Hans Friedrich Blunck, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann and Ernst Toller. By exploring the agendas pursued by writers on the international stage and their direct and indirect interactions with state and non-state institutions, the thesis illuminates a spectrum of approaches to cultural diplomacy in the Weimar years. The thesis demonstrates how attempts to use varying conceptions of culture to diverse diplomatic ends were underpinned by manifold understandings of Germany’s position in the European and international orders; illustrates the differing negotiations of the sensitive relationship between culture and politics; and traces a range of expressions of nationalism, internationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism. This study of writers’ contributions to German foreign affairs sheds new light on the selected case studies and on the openness and contingency of the period, bringing new perspectives to bear on the complexities of the cultural politics and ideological landscape of the Weimar Republic.

This thesis is a dialectical exploration of the importance of the Jewish tradition and theology in the work of Walter Benjamin, primarily through his reading of Franz Joseph Molitor's Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition, and secondarily through his close friendship with Gershom Scholem. It also argues that the influence of the Jewish tradition is a constant factor in Benjamin's work, transcending the conventional division between his 'metaphysical' Frühwerk and his 'Marxist' Spätwerk. The first chapter presents a historical-philosophical overview of the form and content of the Jewish tradition, with particular emphasis on the seminal importance of language as the medium of tradition. The second chapter offers both an exhaustive philological investigation of Benjamin's contacts with Molitor's book, on the basis of new information gathered from both Benjamin's and Scholem's diaries and correspondence, as well as a selection and discussion of some of the most salient and relevant aspects of Philosophie der Geschichte. The third and final chapter assesses the impact of the foregoing as it culminates in the work of Walter Benjamin. Firstly, it focuses on the early essays Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen and Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie, drawing parallels between their conception of language as a medium and Jewish concepts of language and tradition as they are presented by Molitor and Scholem. Secondly, it turns to the Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen and to Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus, Das Passagen-Werk, to illustrate the continuity of his thoughts on language and tradition in the concept of profane Erleuchtung. After each chapter, a short interlude focuses on different forms of Judaism in Benjamin's work, notably the Jewish concept of commentary in the essays on Kafka, the concept of the understated apocalypse and the name of God.

This thesis deals with the cross-cultural relations between Brecht and China through an analysis of how Brecht responded to the traditional Chinese theatre and how his drama was received in turn by modern Chinese theatre. It attempts to examine the respective socio-cultural or political contexts wherein such kind of crosscultural contacts were needed, and the consequent aesthetic-theatrical as well as socio-cultural or political changes brought about by these contacts that have produced two distinctively independent yet related forms of theatre. It is argued that Brecht's search for a theatre style of his own amidst the sociocultural as well as political crises between the two world wars made him look to the East for inspirations, and his direct encounter with Mei Lanfang enabled him to interpret the latter's acting in such a way that he responded to it with his postulation of the alienation effect and modification of a gestic performance style. His repudiation of the well-made dramatic theatre brought his epic theatre closer to the traditional Chinese theatre whose aesthetic principles he shared in constructing a non- Aristotelian episodic form of drama. In his experimentations with new modes of theatrical expressions, he did not simply borrow or copy the forms and content of classical Chinese drama; he appropriated, transformed and renewed them, for example, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for the particular purpose of instructing audiences in a scientific age. China! s reception of Brecht has had much to do with the country's changing socio-cultural as well as political situations. Chinese theatre practitioners responded to him because he was a politically, culturally and aesthetically suitable figure. His epic drama provided an alternative style for the Chinese in their attempt to innovate their realist spoken drama imported from the West, and was also introduced into local forms of performing arts in hope that the traditional Chinese theatre could be resurrected. Furthermore, he prompted Huang Zuolin to theoretically re-examine Chinese operas, which the latter integrated with techniques of Brecht and Stanislavsky into spoken drama to establish a new theatre style called Xieyi drama.

This study of Ibsen in England is divided into three sections. The first section chronicles Ibsen-related events between 1872, when his work was first introduced to a Briton, and 1888, when growing interest in the 'higher drama' culminated in a truly popular edition of three of Ibsen's plays. During these early years, knowledge about and appreciation of Ibsen's work was limited to a fairly small number of intellectuals and critics. A matinee performance in 1880 attracted praise, but successive productions were bowdlerized adaptations. Until 1889, when the British professional premiere of A Doll's House set all of London talking, the lack of interest among actors and producers placed the responsibility for eliciting interest in Ibsen on translators, lecturers, and essayists. The controversy initiated by A Doll's House was intensified in 1891, the so-called Ibsen Year, when six productions, numerous new translations, debates, lectures, published and acted parodies, and countless articles considered the value and desirability of Ibsen's startling modern plays. The central section of this study is concerned solely with the year 1891, and considers in detail the forums for debate; Ibsenite and non-Ibsenite partisans, activity, and opinion; and audience and popular reaction. In addition to prompting discussion about social issues, Ibsen's plays also challenged the censorship system, the actor-mangers' cartel, and the stock-in-trade decorous well-made play. In the 1890s, when Ibsen's themes and style changed, it became apparent that popular and critical taste had absorbed the lessons of plays like Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, and that their comparatively conventional structures and recognizable systems of signification were greatly preferred to the symbolic poeticism of plays like The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken. Most of the later plays were relegated to independent producing societies whose technical and financial resources could not possibly provide suitable scenery or adequate rehearsal, while some of the greatest actors of the day accrued kudos in the earlier polemical plays. By the turn of the century, the Ibsenite impulse had diminished, and his erstwhile champions either promoted a false Ibsen Legend or morosely conceded defeat by a theatre where musical comedy and burlesque flourished. The final section of this study describes the aftermath of the Ibsen Year, and activity in the years leading up to the dramatist's death. General discussion of production style, acting technique, and the modernist movement as a whole are also included in the final chapter. One objective of this research has been to identify and analyze the whole spectrum of response, among as many types of readers, playgoers, and commentators as possible. To this end, a great variety of Victorian periodicals have been consulted, and columns of theatrical gossip, leading articles, interviews, and letters to editors have been sought to supplement the reviews, learned essays, and feuilletons by theatrical journalists and professional critics. Personal accounts in diaries, letters, and autobiographies have also been sought to provide indications of popular interest and opinion, and of Ibsen's place in the avant garde and mainstream theatre.