Böcker i Studies in Modern German Literature-serien

Despite the considerable amount of scholarship on Mann's work, his tetralogy - composed prior to and during his exile from Nazi Germany - has received less attention and has not been examined from perspective of relationship of visuality to narrative. This book examines the ways the novel's protagonists frame their environment through knowledge.

This work reconsiders the connections between mysticism, nationalism and modernity in twentieth-century German cultures. Disengaging mysticism from occultism, the author creates a new space for reconsidering mysticism¿s links to larger structures of modernity already at play at the turn of the century. Rather than dismissing mysticism as a strain of anti-modern irrationalism with troubling links to radical politics such as Nazism, the author reconceptualizes modern mysticism as an unwittingly logical expression of the same compression of time and space created by the emergence of the newspaper, radio, railways and telegraph and reflected in the novels of Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil and Max Frisch.

This analysis of the ideal of Heimat in Hesse's Demian, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf is a significant contribution to Hesse scholarship, as well as a fascinating re-evaluation of the culture-bound concept of Heimat itself. Kiryakakis shows how the three novels form a trilogy, with each successive hero expanding upon and benefitting from the experiences of his precursor, and draws parallels between the novels and Hesse's own tenuous relationship to his Heimat. Using both textual and biographical analysis, he examines the three novels within the framework of a continuum, which reflects various developmental stages in the heros' search for the lost ideal of Heimat. Thus he shows how, ultimately, the trilogy not only depicts the development of an individual, but epitomizes the very nature of twentieth-century existence.

I/You focuses on representations of self and other in the philosophical fragments and prose of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel. Dr. Strand traces connections between their writings on otherness and Jacques Lacan's poststructuralist, psychoanalytic theories. Early Romantic notions of women and the Orient are analyzed. Luce Irigaray's feminist critiques of Western thought inform the discussions on early Romantic writings on gender. The connections between philosophy and literature are emphasized.