Todd Curtis Kontje Libri

An historical overview of criticism of the Bildungsroman from the late 18th century to the present.This book provides an historical overview of criticism of the Bildungsroman from the late 18th century to the present. Although written for scholars of the German novel it will also be of interest to scholars in other literatures.The genre of the Bildungsroman includes some of the greatest German novels yet its definition is considerably less obvious than imagined by the majority of scholars and students who use the term.The book rejects the notion that criticism seeks to elucidate the timeless values of classics, and moves toward the analysis of the cultural and historical factors that shape the reception of a text, genre, or author in successive generations of readers.

Rethinks German literature by challenging the notion that national literature is the narrative of a spiritually united people

Provides a comprehensive reevaluation of Thomas Mann as the representative German author of the Age of Empire, placing Mann's comments about Jews and the Jewish characters in his fiction in the larger context of his attentiveness to racial difference, both in the world at large and in himself.

A fresh examination of the role of the East in the German literary imagination, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present

New, specially commissioned essays on representative works of 19th-century German realism.

Todd Kontje offers the first survey in English of novels by German women from 1771 to 1871. He introduces readers to the lives and works of fourteen women writers of the period--including Sophie von LaRoche, Sophie Mereau, Fanny Lewald, and Eugenie Marlitt--and argues that their novels played an important role in shaping attitudes toward class, gender, and the nation in the century preceding Germany's first unification. Women, the Novel, and the German Nation explores ways in which novels about traditionally feminine domestic concerns also comment on patriarchal politics in the German fatherland.

This study analyses the way in which Schiller sought to connect history with aesthetics in his Aesthetic Education. Rhetoric is seen as a key concept which allows for the combination of formal and sociological interpretation of Schiller's text. A close analysis of Schiller's argument stresses both the positive nature of his ideal, and the problematic results of his imperfect attempt to integrate this ideal with reality. The structural breaks in Schiller's argument are then related to the social context in which the theory was formulated.