Journal of European Studies articles from June 1995

Journal of European Studies archives from June 1995

An inhuman transcendence: Perken, in Malraux's La Voie royale.
June 1, 1995... A number of commentators have described Perken, a central character in Andre Malraux's second novel, La Voie royale, as a figure of heroic stature for whom the experience of adventure constitutes a bid to affirm the significance of the human...

Max Weber: the fate of homo-hermeneut in a disenchanted world.
June 1, 1995... Introduction German philosophy at the turn of the century both exhibited and helped to form one of the paradoxes that defined the Western understanding of the self thereafter. While Nietzsche in his philosophy of nihilism shattered the last...

A blurred picture: adolescent girls growing up in Fanny Burney, George Eliot, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Dacia Maraini.
June 1, 1995... She experienced a sudden distress of spirit, thinking in a half-conscious way that she hadn't - hadn't yet found herself . . . couldn't - could not put herself together, all of a piece (. . .) Why suffer so much?(1) Adolescence is certainly...

The reception of Steven Spielberg's 'Schindler's List' in the German media.
June 1, 1995... I The German premiere of Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List took place in Frankfurt - where Oskar Schindler had spent the last years of his life - on 1 March 1994. The premiere was something of an occasion and was attended by Spielberg...

Robin Hood - the English outlaw.
June 1, 1995... The persistent and widespread appeal to English audiences of versions of the Robin Hood myth, demonstrated most recently by BBC television's choice of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as prime-time Christmas Day viewing, is made plain in the data...

The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England.
June 1, 1995... This large book houses a large claim: that the interaction of culture transcends the question-begging limitations of periodization and the nation-state to create a literary unity which is recognizable beyond (but also through) linguistic...

Early Modernism. Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1915.
June 1, 1995... This book is doubly challenging. The first task Christopher Butler has set himself is to correct the literary bias which informs so many accounts of this intellectual context. But where his own really avoids the risk of being (yet) another...

The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age.
June 1, 1995... This is essentially an anthology of strategy. Bar a brief introduction, the book is devoted to extracts from a wide variety of authors. Reviewing such a work entails not so much commenting on a few pages of Polybius, but rather discussing the...

The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe.
June 1, 1995... The multiplication of new states in the area of the former Soviet bloc and the attempts to construct a supra-national body in Western Europe bring into focus the questions of what constitutes national identity and the institution of the...

The Anthropology of Europe: Identities and Boundaries in Conflict.
June 1, 1995... The multiplication of new states in the area of the former Soviet bloc and the attempts to construct a supra-national body in Western Europe bring into focus the questions of what constitutes national identity and the institution of the...

Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789.
June 1, 1995... In 1751, Pinot Duclos distinguished 'l'homme sociable' from the courtier who was merely 'aimable', but limited the sphere of true sociability to the educated: 'A l'exception du bas peuple qui n'a que des idles relatives a ses besoins, le reste...

Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France.
June 1, 1995... In 1751, Pinot Duclos distinguished 'l'homme sociable' from the courtier who was merely 'aimable', but limited the sphere of true sociability to the educated: 'A l'exception du bas peuple qui n'a que des idles relatives a ses besoins, le reste...

The Hebertistes to the Guillotine: Anatomy of a 'Conspiracy' in Revolutionary France.
June 1, 1995... 'Le conspirateur l'agent de l'etranger est un Protee, il prend toutes les formes', wrote Anatole France in Les Dieux ont soif. Revolutionary governments all too easily exploited an obsession with hidden plots to manipulate public opinion, and...

Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre.
June 1, 1995... 'Le conspirateur l'agent de l'etranger est un Protee, il prend toutes les formes', wrote Anatole France in Les Dieux ont soif. Revolutionary governments all too easily exploited an obsession with hidden plots to manipulate public opinion, and...

The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination.
June 1, 1995... The guillotine was an efficient and, as some liked to think, a humane machine for killing the enemies of the Republic, and there was a certain egalitarianism in making Louis XVI bow his neck beneath its falling blade. It was, however, one thing...

The Cambridge Companion to Foucault.
June 1, 1995... The Foucault archive needs almost an archeology of its own as interest in Foucault's work has been developed in the various disciplines in which he wrote, and punished by critics antagonistic or protagonistic to his approaches. The gamut of...

Marguerite Yourcenar: vers la rive d'une Ithaque interieure.
June 1, 1995... From its title, this book signals an Odyssian experience with a difference, and Harris delivers a tour de force beyond the expectations set up concerning its critical remit. Not only is this a study of Yourcenar's work which combines rigour,...

The Novels of Philippe Sollers: Narrative and the Visual.
June 1, 1995... There is certainly an open field for monographs in English of the works of Sollers and Pollard's book offers an introductory foray into this territory. The novels are approached chronologically and grouped according to three 'bio-periods' of...

The Shocking Ballad Picture Show.
June 1, 1995... Most non-specialists will know of the Bankelsang only from hearsay and from Brecht's use of it in the Dreigroschenoper. Yet for some four hundred years, until their final demise in the nineteen-forties, itinerant ballad singers who underlined...

The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud.
June 1, 1995... There can be no doubt that German humour is a subject to be taken seriously. Not only did a tension, or a balance, have to be maintained in the days of bel esprit between Schwank and Humor, and subsequently between Witz and Komik, but also the...

Poetic Realism in Scandinavia and Central Europe: 1820-1895.
June 1, 1995... All students of nineteenth-century German literature encounter the 'Novelle of Poetic Realism', only to find that both terms have been controversial for many decades. The term 'Poetic Realism' is usually ascribed to the novelist and critic...

The German Novella: Two Centuries of Criticism.
June 1, 1995... All students of nineteenth-century German literature encounter the 'Novelle of Poetic Realism', only to find that both terms have been controversial for many decades. The term 'Poetic Realism' is usually ascribed to the novelist and critic...

The Problematic Bourgeois: Twentieth-Century Criticism on Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain.
June 1, 1995... The volume on Thomas Mann by Hugh Ridley in Camden House's series of books about books about books is at its best when it tells us about Mann by way of its account of his critics. Ridley does this when he concentrates upon contemporary reactions...

Max Weber und die literarische Moderne: Ambivalente Begegnungen zweier Kulturen.
June 1, 1995... Beginning from the assertion that Weber is widely regarded 'als reprasentativer Vertreter einer "rationalistischen" Moderne, die sich nicht zuletzt durch die Abdrangung der Kunst oder aber durch ihre rationalistische Vereinnahmung...

From Bohemia to the Barricades: Erich Muhsam and the Development of a Revolutionary Drama.
June 1, 1995... As the author modestly puts it, we are dealing here with 'a limited literary biography emphasizing Muhsam's dramas' seen 'as expressions of a developing political radicalism' (p. 4). Muhsam is best remembered for the baneful part he played in the...

Die Dadaisten.
June 1, 1995... For many years now, the Rowohlt Verlag has been producing brief, but insightful and well-documented monographs on major literary figures and has now brought out one (No.536) on the Dadaists collectively. Basically, we are dealing here with a...

Architekturkritik in der Zeit und uber die Zeit hinaus: Texte 1913-1946.
June 1, 1995... Adolf Behne (1885-1948) was one of the most far-seeing German critics of the Modernist period and a passionate apologist for Modernist art and architecture. Besides being an enormously productive publicist, he was a tireless organizer and teacher...

Kleinkarierte Avantgarde: Zur Neubewertung des deutschen Dadaismus. Der fruhe Richard Huelsenbeck: Sein Leben und Werk bis 1916 in Dartellung und Interpretation.
June 1, 1995... There is a certain irony in the fact that a poet, who spent most of his life as a doctor or psychiatrist, whose aeuvre 1913-1916 can be contained at the back of this volume as a 16-page pamphlet and who belonged to a movement which set great...

Walter Hasenclever: Eine Biographie der deutschen Moderne.
June 1, 1995... Bert Kasties's new biography of the dramatist Walter Hasenclever (1890-1940), the first to be written on the basis of total access to the writer's huge Nachlass, is expensive but worth every Pfennig. To date, much of the secondary literature on...

Franz Jung: Leben und Werk eines Rebellen.
June 1, 1995... Franz Jung, the permanent rebel who defies classification (pp. 10-11), is generally regarded as an important second-division writer of Expressionist prose and the most unjustifiably neglected left-wing writer of the early Weimar years....

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement.
June 1, 1995... Richard Noll's book opens with a discussion of the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche by Ferdinand Tonnies, and in a sense it concludes with Nietzsche, proclaiming the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung to be the founder of a 'Nietzschean religion' who...

Daughters of Eve: Women's Writing from the German Democratic Republic.
June 1, 1995... This anthology unites short stories, documentary sketches, excerpts from novels, essays and autobiographical notes, almost all of which are presented here for the first time in English. Although a quarter of a century separates the youngest of...

Fictions of Germany: Images of the German Nation in the Modern Novel.
June 1, 1995... In these days of increasing specialization, with dogmatic critics setting up defensive encampments around every fashionable theory, it is a pleasure to read the work of a scholar who demonstrates a broad range of learning and shuns literary...

Holocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul Celan.
June 1, 1995... This book is a response to one of the vital difficulties of Paul Celan's work: how does the poet speak about and traverse the extreme sense of rupture which he registers as a Jew writing in German after Auschwitz? Samuels explores the ways in...

Russian Politics and Society.
June 1, 1995... This book is one of the most comprehensive textbooks on the new Russia to appear in the past three years. In this breadth lie both its strengths and its weaknesses, for although attractively organized and clearly written, for the most part it is...

Dostoevsky's 'Notes from Underground'.
June 1, 1995... Richard Peace has produced an admirably lucid, concise and useful critical guide to Dostoevskii's seminal Notes from Underground. The first part of his book consists of Commentaries to Parts I and II of the Notes. Using the structural analogy of...

Russians and Dutchmen: Proceedings of the Conference on the Relations between Russia and the Netherlands from the 16th to the 20th Century.
June 1, 1995... At the beginning of June 1989 a wide-ranging exhibition on the theme of 'Russians and Dutchmen' opened in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. In the autumn of the same year it was transferred to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The catalogue, published in...

Dialogues with Dostoevsky: The Overwhelming Questions.
June 1, 1995... It is a rare pleasure to review a book such as this, a magisterial collection of essays shewing a depth of understanding and a respect for the integrity of the writer that come with the years of reflection Prof. Jackson has devoted to...

Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question and the Victorian Novel.
June 1, 1995... A woman commits adultery; partly in consequence, she dies; virtue's reward is family happiness. Here endeth the lesson, and the plot-summary of scores of nineteenth-century realist novels. Amy Mandelker, while accepting the appropriateness of...

Boris Eikhenbaum. Voices of a Russian Formalist.
June 1, 1995... This is a very timely book. As the twentieth century draws to a close and we all, allegedly, surf happily on the information highway, creating endlessly provisional meanings, whether as readers or writers, it is salutary and exhilarating to have...