Although German Americans number almost 43 million and are the largest ethnic group in the United States, scholars of American literature have paid little attention to this influential and ethnically diverse cultural group. In a work of unparalleled depth and range, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz explores the cultural and historical background of the varied images of Germany and Germans throughout the past two centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach known as comparative imagology, which borrows from social psychology and cultural anthropology, Zacharasiewicz samples a broad spectrum of original sources, including literary works, letters, diaries, autobiographical accounts, travelogues, newspaper reports, films, and even cartoons and political caricatures. Starting with the notion of Germany as the ideal site for academic study and travel in the nineteenth century and concluding with the twentieth-century image of Germany as an aggressive country, this innovative work examines the ever-changing image of Germans and Germany in the writings of Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, William James, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Thomas Wolfe, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Styron, Walker Percy, and John Hawkes, among others.

Starting with the notion of Germany as the ideal site for academic study and travel in the 19th century and concluding with the twentieth-century image of Germany as an aggressive country, this work examines the everchanging image of Germans and Germany in the writings of Louisa May Alcott, Henry James, William James, John Dewey, among others.

Examines the image of the US in German poetry and the reception and influence of American poetry in Germany since 1945. This book focuses on the image of the US in German poetry and the reception of American poetry in Germany since 1945. Gregory Divers examines poems by major figures in 20th-century German literature - Benn, Brecht, Bachmann, Jandl, and Grass, among others - and by other poets who shaped America's postwar image in Germany. Divers traces America's postwar status in Germany from the prisoner-of-war poems of Günter Eich to the pop poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Peter Handke. Continuing, he finds that although the 1960s protest poems of Erich Fried and others reflect the tarnishing of America's image due to Vietnam, 1970s travel poems by Brinkmann, Kunert, and Kunze confirm the resiliency of that image. Finally, Divers looks at poems by Hartung, Delius, and Kling to illustrate the new heights reached by America's image within German literary circles during the 1980s, and the status of America in Germany after reunification. In charting these developments in postwar German poetry, Divers also shows how American influences are crucial to its understanding, not only surveying postwar German reception of Whitman, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, but also examining the influence of such figures as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Gregory Divers is Assistant Professor of German at Saint Louis University.

Although fictional—and often fantastic—representations of nature have been a distinguishing feature of Latin American literature for centuries, ecocriticism, understood as the study of literature as it relates to depictions of the natural world, environmental issues, and the ways in which human beings interact and identify with their natural surroundings, did not emerge as a field of scholarly interest in the region until the end of the twentieth century. This volume employs an ecocritical lens in order to explore and question the use of the river imagery in Latino and Latin American literature from the colonial period to our modern world, creating a space in which to examine both its literal and figurative meanings, associated as much with processes of a personal nature as with those of the collective experience in the region. The slow, meandering streams of nostalgia, the raging currents of conflict or the stagnant waters of social decay are just a few of the ways in which the river has become an important symbol and inspiration to many of the region’s writers. This book offers a diverse collection of writings that, through a trans-historical and trans-geographical perspective, allows us, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, to reflect on the rich and dynamic image of the river and, by extension, on the vital context of Latin/o America, its people and societies.

Of all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city’s image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the ways the city has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors through 145 novels, short stories, plays and poems, Tales of Berlin presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American society which have contextualized its meaning for Americans in the past, and continue to do so today.

This 1997 book analyses how German and American views of each other developed, providing a fresh analysis of an often complex relationship.

Praiseworthy and complete scholarship make this the definitive work on the subject.

This volume continues the tradition in the series� Hallenser Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik of representing the full thematic diversity of research in English and American studies. The articles - mainly written by young researchers in their postgraduate or postdoctoral phases - span the areas of English and American literature, culture studies and linguistics as well as the teaching of English as a foreign language (Fachdidaktik). At the same time they represent various theoretical approaches adopted by young German researchers and the interplay of theoretical and applied issues.

Transatlantic Religion offers a historical reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American Christianity, one that emphasizes European connections. Its authors represent a diverse group of international scholars offering new insights based on a range of analytical approaches to previously unexamined archival sources.

Transforming Girls: The Work of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence explores the paradox of the nineteenth-century girls’ book. On the one hand, early novels for adolescent girls rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy. On the other, they provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. The early girls’ book frames female adolescence as an opportunity for productive investment in the self. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves, the education they provide, and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. The purpose of these novels is to approach adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—from another perspective, one in which fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self are celebrated. They provide alternatives to cultural beliefs about what it was like to be a white, middle-class girl in the nineteenth century and challenge the assumption that the evolution of the girls’ book is always a movement towards less sexist, less restrictive images of girls. Drawing on forgotten bestsellers in the United States and Germany (where this genre is referred to as Backfischliteratur), Transforming Girls offers insightful readings that call scholars to reexamine the history of the girls’ book. It also outlines an alternate model for imagining adolescence and supporting adolescent girls. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.