Julian Preece

Preece Julian

Offers a rounded contemporary appraisal of Central Europe's most distinctive Modernist.

The Cambridge Companion to Kafka

“Brisk [and] forceful.” Sight & Sound "Lucidly argued.” Total Film Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) was a pivotal film for the New German Cinema movement. Julian Preece considers what makes Katharina Blum new and radical, in particular in respect of women's cinema and its portrayal of the ordeal of its female lead in a world run by men. Drawing on archival material including drafts of the screenplay, brochures and props, reviews and interviews, Preece traces the conception of the film and its development from Heinrich Böll's original novel. Preece analyses how the film continues to resonate with our contemporary moment and has influenced film-makers from the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin to the British screenwriter Peter Morgan.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

Ilija Trojanow established his name as an international writer with the novel Der Weltensammler or The Collector of Worlds (2006). This volume contains an interview with Trojanow, a previously unpublished essay on Lessing's Nathan the Wise, and essays by European and North American scholars on central aspects of Trojanow's growing oeuvre.

Ilija Trojanow

K. Stuart Parkes

Arthur Williams

The aesthetic and linguistic concerns of German-language writers are explored against the backdrop of a readership in transition. Two essays examine intertextuality as a concept and as a phenomenon in the work of Christa Wolf, before the first main set (aesthetics) addresses narrative techniques (Jurek Becker, Wolfgang Hilbig, Hans Joachim Schädlich), formal experimentation (Ror Wolf, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Hanns-Josef Ortheil), allegory (Christoph Ransmayr), metaphor (Eveline Hasler), feminine aesthetics (Brigitte Kronauer, Anne Duden), and links between literature and photography (Rolf Dieter Brinkmann). The second main group presents a series of analyses of language as problem and practice: Sprachlosigkeit (Ilse Aichinger, Robert Schneider), logocentricity and etymology (Heinrich Böll, Elisabeth Reichart), and authenticity and cliché (Werner Schwab, Rainald Goetz), Ralf Schnell's concluding essay is an assessment of a situation which allows writers more freedom as the shackles of the past are cast off.

Contemporary German Writers, Their Aesthetics and Their Language

Literature, History, Politics

The Life and Work of Günter Grass

These essays examine the interrelationships between literature, markets and media in contemporary Germany and Austria. A series of studies of individual writers is complemented by broader analyses of the responsibilities of the intellectual.

Literature, Markets and Media in Germany and Austria Today

Continuities in German-language Literature

Whose Story?

"Upon its release, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) was a pivotal film for the New German Cinema movement. Released in the same year that members of the Baader-Meinhof gang went on trial for their politically-motivated crimes against corporate Germany, the film portrayed a female lead who, facing unjust persecution by the police and the media, resorts to lethal violence. Julian Preece's study considers what makes Katharina Blum new and radical, a turning point in numerous contexts, especially with respect to women's cinema and the portrayal of the female lead. Drawing on archival material including drafts of the screenplay, brochures and props, reviews and interviews, Preece traces the conception of the film and its development from the original short novel authored by Heinrich Böll, considering the differing contributions of the co-directors von Trotta and Schlöndorff. First-hand accounts by members of the cast and production team, including cinematographer Jost Vacano, producer Eberhard von Junkersdorf, and actors Angela Winkler and Mario Adorf, provide unique insight into the film's production. Inspiring numerous spin-offs throughout the 2000s, the film's themes continue to resonate with our contemporary moment, particularly in its depiction of a young woman's ordeal in a world run by men. Through an analysis of these adaptations (the most recent from 2014) Preece depicts the film's lasting influence, while also highlighting what makes the original film distinctive"--

A fresh, nuanced view of Veza Canetti's literary career and its relationship to that of her famous husband.

Out of the Shadows of a Husband

The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti

Günter Grass was Germany’s foremost writer for more than half a century, and his books were and remain best-sellers across the world. The Tin Drum was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1979, and the memoir Peeling the Onion astounded readers by revealing Grass had been drafted into the military wing of the SS, a ruthless component of the Nazi war machine, in the closing months of World War II. Grass also wrote memorably about the German student movement, feminism, and German reunification, and was a key influence on magical realist authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, as well as on the popular novelist John Irving. Günter Grass is the first biography in English of this Nobel Prize–winning writer. Julian Preece introduces both Grass’s key works and political activities, chronicling his interaction with major figures from literary and public life like holocaust poet Paul Celan, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and cofounder of the Red Army Faction Ulrike Meinhof. From Grass’s campaigning as a citizen for the anti-Nazi resistor and Social Democrat leader Willy Brandt to his more recent invectives against free-market capitalism, Preece places Grass’s fiction and public work in the context of Cold War European politics and post-unification Germany, painting an indelible portrait of a writer who reinvented the postwar German novel and redefined the role of literary commitment.

Günter Grass

William Collins Donahue

Though he died in the last decade of the twentieth century, the satirist, social thinker, memoirist, and dramatist Elias Canetti lives on into the present. Testifying to the author's undeniable cultural afterlife, the essays gathered together here represent a wide swath of the latest Canetti scholarship. Contributors examine Canetti's Jewish identity; the Marxist politics of his youth; his influence on writers as diverse as Bachmann, Jelinek, and Sebald; the undiscovered poetry of his literary testament (Nachlass); his status as a self-cancelling satirist; and his complex and sometimes ambivalent citation of Chinese and French cultural icons. In addition, this volume presents a treatment of Canetti as philosopher; as contributor to the great debate on the genesis of violence; as a chronicler of the WWII exile experience; as well as a personal reminiscence by one of the great Canetti scholars of our time, Gerald Stieg. The Worlds of Elias Canetti challenges conventional wisdom about this Nobel laureate and opens up new areas to scholarly investigation. The Worlds of Elias Canetti convenes diverse disciplinary perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and ambidextrous authors of the twentieth century. An internationally renowned team of scholars places Canetti's social thought and literary oeuvre within intriguing new contexts, highlighting as yet underexplored connections within areas such as philosophy, Jewish Studies, cultural anthropology, literary intertextuality, and beyond. Compellingly, this volume introduces us to a Canetti we have not yet known, and one who equally belongs to the twenty-first century. In its scope and originality, The Worlds of Elias Canetti sets a new standard-and not just for Canetti scholarship. Jochen Vogt, Professor of German Literature, University of Essen

Centenary Essays

The Worlds of Elias Canetti

Katie Jones

Aled Rees

This carefully curated collection of essays charts interactions between majority languages (including English, French, German, Italian and Japanese) and minority dialects or languages pushed to the margins (including Arabic, Bengali, Esperanto, Neapolitan and Welsh) through a series of case studies of leading modern and contemporary cultural producers. The contributors, who work and study across the globe, extend critical understanding of literary multilingualism to the subjects of migration and the exophonic, self-translation and the aesthetics of interlinguistic bricolage, language death and language perseveration, and power in linguistic hierarchies in (post-)colonial contexts. Their subjects include the authors Julia Alvarez, Elena Ferrante, Jonathan Franzen, Amélie Nothomb, Ali Smith, Yoko Tawada, and Dylan Thomas, the film-maker Ulrike Ottinger, and the anonymous performers of Griko. The volume will be of interest to students of creative writing, literature, translation, and sociolinguistics.

From Translingualism to Language Mixing

International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures

Osman Durrani

Reisende durch Zeit und Raum

Most of the chapters in this volume were delivered as papers at a conference on the same theme held at the University of Kent in April 2002. The essays collected here, by scholars from the UK, Ireland, Germany, and the US, address a topic of fundamental concern across all the disciplines engaged with the study of contemporary Germany: the evolving relationship between urban and rural space, the metropolitan centre and the provincial Heimat. The volume identifies and investigates a number of recent trends: the emergence of 'eco-literature', the renaissance of writing - in prose and verse - inspired by the new Berlin, the realignment of regional sensibilities, which is complicated by the troubled tradition of Heimat in all its literary manifestations, and the continuing disjunctions between East and West. Individual essays engage with the work of established writers (Günter de Bruyn, Hubert Fichte, Peter Handke, WG Sebald, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, and Elfriede Jelinek) and emerging talents (Georg Klein, Christof Hamann, Ludwig Laher, and Arnold Stadler).

Cityscapes and Countryside in Contemporary German Literature

The German Historical Novel / Der Deutschsprachige Historische Roman

Travellers in Time and Space / Reisende Durch Zeit Und Raum

Though he died in the last decade of the twentieth century, the satirist, social thinker, memoirist, and dramatist Elias Canetti lives on into the present. Testifying to the author’s undeniable cultural “afterlife,” the essays gathered together here represent a wide swath of the latest Canetti scholarship. Contributors examine Canetti’s Jewish identity; the Marxist politics of his youth; his influence on writers as diverse as Bachmann, Jelinek, and Sebald; the undiscovered “poetry” of his literary testament (Nachlass); his status as a self-cancelling satirist; and his complex and sometimes ambivalent citation of Chinese and French cultural icons. In addition, this volume presents a treatment of Canetti as philosopher; as contributor to the great debate on the genesis of violence; as a chronicler of the WWII exile experience; as well as a personal reminiscence by one of the great Canetti scholars of our time, Gerald Stieg. The Worlds of Elias Canetti challenges conventional wisdom about this Nobel laureate and opens up new areas to scholarly investigation. “The Worlds of Elias Canetti convenes diverse disciplinary perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and ambidextrous authors of the twentieth century. An internationally renowned team of scholars places Canetti’s social thought and literary oeuvre within intriguing new contexts, highlighting as yet underexplored connections within areas such as philosophy, Jewish Studies, cultural anthropology, literary intertextuality, and beyond. Compellingly, this volume introduces us to a Canetti we have not yet known, and one who equally belongs to the twenty-first century. In its scope and originality, The Worlds of Elias Canetti sets a new standard—and not just for Canetti scholarship.” Jochen Vogt, Professor of German Literature, University of Essen

Frank Finlay

Twenty-five essays by scholars from the UK, Ireland, Germany and Australia explore two aspects of new German-language literature. The first dozen studies focus on the variety and depth of the 'dialogue' - in the sense of reciprocal influences - between literature, photography, film, painting, architecture, and music. The remaining essays alight on 'Life-Writing' in most of its forms (diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and autobiographical fiction) and examine its centrality in recent years in German literature, not least because of the shadow which World War Two continues to cast over national life.

Julian Preece

Books

Your next favorite book is out there