Journal of European Studies articles from September 1996

Journal of European Studies archives from September 1996

'A presence...called Germany': personal history in the construction of national identity by post-war German intellectuals: three case-studies.
September 1, 1996... National identity and the German intellectuals(2) In a newspaper article in October 1992 the sociologist Wolf Lepenies wrote: Des Nachdenkens uber Deutschland sind wir mude geworden. Es ist nicht die verdiente Mudigkeit getaner, sondern die...

Jan Kott: the revisionist. (Poland's most famous literary critic)
September 1, 1996... In a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures...

A traitor to his class: the anarchist in British fiction.
September 1, 1996... A plethora of novels published in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain contain anarchist characters. In the great majority of these works the anarchist is featured as a villain of a particularly pernicious kind. He is a master criminal, almost...

The World of Samuel Beckett: 1906-1946.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1: Waiting for Godot.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

The Counterpoint of Hope, Obsession and Desire for Death in Five Plays by Samuel Beckett.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

The Cambridge Companion to Beckett.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

Critique of Beckett Criticism: A Guide to Research in English, French and German.
September 1, 1996... The build-up to 1996 - the year in which Beckett would have been 90 has seen several works published on him, including no less than three biographies, the first to appear since Deirdre Bair's life, now nearly two decades old. The fact that so...

The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England.
September 1, 1996... 'Since the Renaissance stage play and the Reformation sermon perform the same work - helping audiences adjust to and control the peculiar ambiguities of the early modern period - the two modes can be evaluated in the same terms' (p. 3). Given...

Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel.
September 1, 1996... Broadly, Thompson's argument is that 'the discourse of political economy, as it is elaborated across the eighteenth century, constitutes a gradual working through of [a] crisis in the concept of value' (pp. 17-18). He aims to show how this crisis...

Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture.
September 1, 1996... 'This book is about change,' writes Childers '... change in the ways we might view early Victorian culture and the role of the novel in its formation' (p. 1). Childers tries some more high-sounding descriptions of his purposes, but this simple...

Habsburgs and Ottomans Between Vienna and Belgrade (1683-1739).
September 1, 1996... A useful addition to an important series, Parvev concentrates on a crucial period in Habsburg-Ottoman relations. Focusing on themes as well as narrative, Parvev defines the place of the Ottoman empire in the European state system and seeks to...

Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century.
September 1, 1996... This volume undertakes to examine the continuing relevance of the now familiar distinction between public and private. The seminal work of Habermas provides a stimulus for many of the contributors. The approach of half or more of the pieces is...

Ventriloquized Bodies. Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France.
September 1, 1996... Current re-evaluations of nineteenth-century texts as gendered constructs typically concentrate on the prostitute and the hysteric as male-imposed marginalizing categories within which masculine fears of the public and private ungovernability of...

Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space.
September 1, 1996... The scope of this book is admirably ambitious: the poets and painters under discussion offer neither contemporaneity, nor collaboration, nor even close stylistic affinities. On the author's own admission, the choice of subjects is 'a...

Picasso et Apollinaire: Les Metamorphoses de la memoire (1905/1973)
September 1, 1996... Like the structure of this book, a constellation of thirty short chapters, the friendship between Picasso and Apollinaire is a mosaic that derives unity from its heterogeneous facets. Part One, which covers the period from their meeting in 1905...

Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the 'Fait Divers.'
September 1, 1996... This book looks at the way French creative writers throughout the twentieth century have engaged with the competing discourse of journalism, specifically in its most sensational and seductive form, the fait divers. A dense introduction surveys...

Parisian Fields.
September 1, 1996... I write as a heretic, someone for whom Paris has never quite shaken off schoolboy memories of sticky July days, endless queues in search of Art, and miserable journeys on the metro. I have since come to know and love other French cities, but not...

German Cultural Studies: An Introduction.
September 1, 1996... This book comprises seven essays on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century German cultural studies. The essays range from a treatment of the commercialization of culture in Imperial Germany, to the organization of National Socialist ideology, and...

Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue. Essays in German Literary Theory.
September 1, 1996... The title Robert Paslick has given to this selection of Gadamer's essays is potentially misleading. Although the essays 'contain some scattered theoretical assertions about interpretation (Gadamer's central preoccupation), they do not offer the...

Frau im Spiegel: Die Selben und die Andere zwischen Welt und Text. Von Herren, Fremden und Frauen, ein 16. Jahrhundert.
September 1, 1996... This is an astonishing piece of work. On just under a thousand pages, Elisabeth Tiller explores 'a sixteenth century' (an odd formulation in the title, but one intended to resist pretentions to definitiveness) in not only historical and literary,...

The Dear Purchase. A Theme in German Modernism.
September 1, 1996... With this, his last book, Peter Stern provided a fitting memorial to his life's work. Its central concern is to define what he calles 'the temper of an age', in other words the values and attitudes in modern German-speaking culture which were...

August Stramm: Beitrage zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung.
September 1, 1996... In Autumn 1990, 75 years after he was killed on the Eastern Front, the expressionist poet August Stramm was commemorated in his home town of Munster by recitals, an exhibition and an academic symposium of which these are the proceedings....

The Wild Stage. Literary Cabarets of the Weimar Republic.
September 1, 1996... Alan Lareau presents his book as a necessary corrective to the notion that German cabaret of the Weimar period was predominantly avant-garde and political in character. His findings are based on a thorough investigation of the actual programmes...

Thomas Mann's Joseph und seine Bruder and the Phallic Theology of the Old Testament.
September 1, 1996... By 'phallic theology', George Bridges means a 'knowledge of God [...] arrived at through the phallos' (p.245). As well as drawing on Freud, Lacan and Jung, he shows why the scholarly sources Thomas Mann used for Joseph und seine Bruder help us...

Changing Perceptions of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: Criticism 1947-1992.
September 1, 1996... The thought of reading all the critical literature published on Doktor Faustus from 1947 to 1992 is a horrifying one. That horror can be read through the otherwise sedate prose of John Fetzer's study of the reception of Mann's novel. His book is...

Kafka: 'The Metamorphosis','The Trial' and 'The Castle.'
September 1, 1996... If we are to believe Kafka's suggestion that it is only in the chorus of lies that a hint of the truth may be glimpsed, then any compilation of radically differing approaches must surely help readers on their path to enlightenment. Yet do naive...

'Dem Kosmos einen Tritt': Die Entwicklung des Werks von Walter Serner und die Konzeption seiner dadaistischen Kulturkritik.
September 1, 1996... In his opening remarks, Dr Peters states: 'In der literaturwissenschaftlichen Diskussion hat der Dadaismus stets eine Auissenseiterrolle gespielt' (p. 9) and although, since the advent of Post-modernism, this has become less true, on the whole...

Raoul Hausmann: Kunstler - Forscher - Philosoph.
September 1, 1996... What Dr Frenkel says in her introduction is broadly true: 'Die deutschen Avantgarde-Diskussionen zeigen ein ungesichertes Verhaltnis zur Tradition der Weimarer Republik, ein empirisches Defizit und eine Sprache, die in Vorurteilen festgefahren...

Hannah Hoch: Jenseits fester Grenzen - Das malerische Werk bis 1945.
September 1, 1996... As Dr Maurer rightly claims in her Foreword (p. 9), the secondary literature on Hannah Hoch, arguably the most important woman visual artist of Weimar Germany, has focused to date on her collages with particular reference to the Dada period....

Abstraktion als stilbildendes Prinzip in der Lyrik von Hans Arp und Kurt Schwitters.
September 1, 1996... Although it is helpful to read an informed critique of Peter Burger's overly reductionist understanding of Dada (pp. 19-20 and 103), this study adds little to our understanding of Schwitters's poetry (pp. 160-214) and almost nothing to that of...

Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno.
September 1, 1996... Following Adorno's death in 1969, his notoriously difficult work has received different interpretations in different contexts and dicsciplines. Hohendahl's lucidly written and insightful book is the first in a number of years to address a wide...

Assembling (Post)modernism: The Utopian Philosophy of Ernst Bloch.
September 1, 1996... It is ironic that during the 1970s and 1980s, Lyotard's contention that post-modernity's most characteristic feature was the impossibility of meta-narratives should have hardened into a kind of negative meta-narrative, thus allowing theorists...

Ivan Turgenev and Britain.
September 1, 1996... The editors of these two valuable collections keep their options open with the non-committal 'and' conjoining man and nation in their titles. The essays brought together are diverse in origin, theme and approach, ranging from unsigned press...

Dostoevskii and Britain.
September 1, 1996... The editors of these two valuable collections keep their options open with the non-committal 'and' conjoining man and nation in their titles. The essays brought together are diverse in origin, theme and approach, ranging from unsigned press...

Nikolai Zabolotsky: Play for Mortal Stakes.
September 1, 1996... This impressively researched volume examines the life and work of Zabolotskii against the background of the period he lived through. Despite his being a somewhat solitary person and poet, who belonged to no groupings other than the short-lived...

From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917-21.
September 1, 1996... New textbooks about the Russian Revolution of 1917 have appeared thick and fast in recent years, most notably the controversial and keenly-priced two-volume contribution by Richard Pipes. The present work appears at first to be a smaller-scale...

The Gorbachev Factor.
September 1, 1996... The Gorbachev Factor, published the year of post-Soviet Russia's first presidential elections, is a timely reminder of the immense transformations that country has undergone during the past decade. Ironically, the hero of this superb political...