The majority of her [Davies's] readings are perceptive and provocative... her considerable expansion of the corpus of Bluebeard tales to some 70 texts and operas is commendable, especially as many of them have been forgotten for more than a century.' -Times Higher Education Supplement'One seldom encounters a work of literary cricicism that makes such compelling reading as this investigation of the Bluebeard motif in modern German literature... it combines thorough scholarship with imaginative intepretation and intellectual sophistication... this is an exciting book that deserves to be widely read and influential, both within and beyond German studies.' -Journal of European Studies'Bluebeard', in which women are slaughtered and hidden in a horrible chamber by a monstrous husband, is hair-raising; yet its happy ending gives it a utopian force. Davies's book focuses on literature in German from the eighteenth century to the 1990s, and is the first full-length study of the history of Bluebeard published in any language.
The 1960s protest movements marked an astonishing moment for West Germany. They developed a political critique, but are above all distinctive for their overwhelming emphasis on culture and the symbolic. In particular, reading and writing had unique prestige for protesters, who produced an extraordinary textual culture which was by turns polemical, witty, provocative, reflective and offensive. The avant-garde roots of anti-authoritarianism are often as palpable within it as a debt to high literature; but due to its sometimes (apparently) vehemently anti-literary tone, it is frequently overlooked by traditional criticism. This volume outlines an anti-authoritarian poetics by presenting close readings of some emblematic texts, many of them forgotten, others better known. The study embeds its analyses in historical, cultural, political and aesthetic contexts, in order to illuminate some representative moments and preoccupations in protest writing, and it argues that this prolific textual culture exists in a complex tension between utopian impulses and the shadows of the past.
In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of this rich production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in the FRG in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. This book offers, too, a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and the ways in which other voices could speak to it in turn, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.
In the 1960s and 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or West Germany, newspaper readers and television viewers were appalled by terrible images of fires burning half a world away. The Vietnam War was a decisive catalyst for the era’s wider protest movements and gave rise to an ardent anti-war discourse. This discourse privileged writing in many forms. Within it, poetry and poetic writing were key; and because coverage of the conflict in Vietnam often focused on spectacular, destructive conflagrations ignited by hi-tech machines of war, their dominant trope was fire. Hundreds of poems and related writings about Vietnam circulated in the FRG, yet they are almost entirely forgotten today. Poetic Writing and the Vietnam War in West Germany uncovers and explores some of this rich production in order to present a new history of engaged poetic writing in the FRG in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw out distinctive characteristics of wider protest culture. In doing so, it makes the case for attending to marginal, non-canonical or neglected literary and cultural forms, and for critical thinking about why they might, over time, have been obscured. This book offers, too, a case study for reflection on the representation of war, on ways in which German oppositional culture could imagine its others, and the ways in which other voices could speak to it in turn, and on the relationship of poetry to the historical world.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.