Christian Emden

David R. Midgley

This is the second of three volumes based on papers given at the 'Fragile Tradition' conference in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the connections between cultural identity and the sense of nationhood which are to be found in literary writing, the history of ideas, and the interaction between European cultures from the late Middle Ages to the present day. It focuses particularly on the way myths of cultural identity are passed on and transformed historically; on the fashioning of various models of modern German identity with reference to the cultures of Greece, France, England and Renaissance Italy; on the reflection of 19th-century nationalism in literary writing and ideas about language; and on the ways in which cultural values have asserted themselves in relation to moments of catastrophe and abrupt political change in the 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1990s.

Papers from the Conference 'The Fragile Tradition', Cambridge 2002

German Literature, History and the Nation

University Lecturer in German and Fellow David Midgley

The years of the Weimar Republic saw complex cultural change in Germany as well as political turmoil. Writing Weimar draws on the large amount of research done on the period since the 1980s in order to show how literary writers developed critical perspectives on the social and political issuesof the time, and how those perspectives were related to longer-term developments in German culture which run beyond the watershed events of 1918 and 1933. Individual chapters discuss the dominant trends in the poetry, the theatre, and the novel, as well as the literary representation of the city, oftechnology, and of the First World War. The book also sheds new light on one of the abiding mysteries of German culture in the 1920s: precisely what were the implications of the term Neue Sachlichkeit as it came to be applied to the cultural trends of the time?

Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933

Writing Weimar

Catherine Keen

"Based on papers given at the conference 'Imagining the City' held in Cambridge in 2004"--P. [4] of cover, v. 1.

Imagining the City

This is the first of three volumes based on papers given at the conference 'The Fragile Tradition: The German Cultural Imagination Since 1500' in Cambridge, 2002. Together they provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world across the whole of the modern period. This volume highlights the ways in which cultural memory and historical consciousness have been shaped by experiences of discontinuity, focusing particularly on the reception of the Reformation, the literary and ideological heritage of the Enlightenment, and the representation of war, the Holocaust, and the reunification of Germany in contemporary literature and museum culture.

Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-speaking World Since 1500

This volume of conference papers highlights the connections between developments in technology and scientific thought since the 16th century on the one hand, and the ways in which the creative imagination of literary writers has responded to those developments on the other.

David R. Midgley

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