First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume “Bonaventura,” TheNightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett. The narrator and antihero is not Bonaventura but a night watchman named Kreuzgang, a failed poet, actor, and puppeteer who claims to be the spawn of the devil himself. As a night watchman, Kreuzgang takes voyeuristic pleasure in spying on the follies of his fellow citizens, and every night he makes his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door, where he observes framed scenes of murder, despair, theft, romance, and other private activities. In his reactions, Kreuzgang is cynical and pessimistic, yet not without humor. For him, life is a grotesque, macabre, and base joke played by a mechanical and heartless force. Since its publication, fans have speculated on the novel’s authorship, and it is now believed to be by theater director August Klingemann, who first staged Goethe’s Faust. Organized into sixteen separate nightwatches, the sordid scenes glimpsed through parted curtains, framed by door chinks, and lit by candles and shadows anticipate the cinematic. A cross between the gothic and the romantic, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is brilliant in its perverse intensity, presenting an inventory of human despair and disgust through the eyes of a bitter, sardonic watcher who draws laughter from tragedy. Translated by Gerald Gillespie, who supplies a fresh introduction, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura will be welcomed by a new generation of English-language fans eager to sample the night’s dark offerings.

Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) – as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.

This is a strange, darkly ironic novel published under the nom de plume of Bonaventura, originally in German, in 1804. It is a true child of the romantic agony: the narrator and anti-hero, a night watchman named Kreuzgang, was once a poet. Now stripped of all Romantic illusion, he works as a watchman, which gives him a vantage on the follies of other citizens. To Kreuzgang, life is a grotesque, macabre and sordid joke sprung by a mechanical and heartless force. A cult classic in some literary circles (Gothic lit fans and specialists in German Romanticism), the book is uncannily cinematic: Every night, Kreuzgang goes on his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door where he observes a framed scene of murder, despair, theft, romance, or some other private moment. He is cynical and pessimistic and comic in a way that seems current, turning the culture of Romanticism inside out. The writing is, quite simply, brilliant. Ever since Die Nachtwachen was first published fans have speculated on who could have written it. The belief today is that the author was probably the theater director August Klingemann, who, as translator Gerald Gillespie explains, idolized Shakespeare and first staged Goethe s Faust. Certainly Klingemann would have understood the power and artifice of the framed scene. In 1972, Gerald Gillespie published a translation in the Edinburgh Bilingual Series, which was released in the States by the University of Texas Press. Our edition includes the English version only, with a new, less pedantic introduction by Gillespie and a brief afterword."

A rich, expansive book reaching beyond philosophy to literature and the history of ideas with strong appeal to diverse readers.

The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel: Poetics of the Brain revises the dominant narrative about the distinctive psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by reinterpreting the novel’s development from the perspective of the nascent discipline of neuroscience, the emergence of which is coterminous with the rise of the novel form. In particular, it asks how the novel’s formal properties—stylistic, narrative, rhetorical, and figurative—correlate with the formation of a neuroscientific discourse, and how the former may have assisted, disrupted, and/or intensified the medical articulation of neurological concepts. This study poses the question: how does this rapidly evolving field emerge in the context of nineteenth century cultural practices and what were the conditions for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially, to what degree does it owe its existence to literature?

This companion is the first book of its kind to focus on the whole of European Romanticism. Describes the way in which the Romantic Movement swept across Europe in the early nineteenth century. Covers the national literatures of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Spain. Addresses common themes that cross national borders, such as orientalism, Napoleon, night, nature, and the prestige of the fragment. Includes cross-disciplinary essays on literature and music, literature and painting, and the general system of Romantic arts. Features 35 essays in all, from leading scholars in America, Australia, Britain, France, Italy, and Switzerland.

This collection of essays is borne out of the 17th Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference at the University of California, Berkeley. The essays gathered here cover a broad range of topics moving from intersections between the occult and the political, to the entanglement of conceptions of the magical, modernity, media, and aesthetics. The first two essays primarily rely on historical analysis and present a wealth of original research. One chronicles the construction of the witch in Early Modern print media, while the other unfolds the complex relationship of an infighting Third Reich with a multifaceted occult deemed at once fascinating and menacing. The third essay in the collection combines critical, literary, and feminist theories in order to address the magical as an aspect of the fairy tale – a theme in the works of Jelinek and Adorno – and as a challenge to Enlightenment reason. The next two essays, influenced heavily by narratology and semiotics, present close readings of 19th century novellas that question the nexus of mediality and perception, magic and narrative structure. The first of these two essays deals with the liminality of the marionette as it is caught between its mechanical and marvelous qualities in E. T. A. Hoffman’s Rat Krespel (Councilor Krespel), while the latter addresses the collapse of reality mirrored by the magical collapse of metaphor in Theodor Storm’s Pole Poppenspäler (Paul the Puppeteer). The last essay rounds out the compilation with a focus on new media. With close analyses of the films in Lang’s Mabuse trilogy, this essay charts their relation to the enchantment and disenchantment of the medium of film.

This book traces the German-Hebrew contact zones in which Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss lived and produced their creative work in early twentieth-century Germany and later in British Mandate Palestine after their voluntary or forced migration in the 1920s and 1930s. Set in shifting historical contexts and literary debates – the notion of the German vernacular nation, Hebraism and Jewish Revival in Weimar Germany, the crisis of language in modernist literature, and the fledgling multilingual communities in Jerusalem, the writings of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss emerge as unique forms of counterlanguage. The three chapters of the book are dedicated to Scholem’s Hebraist lamentation, Kraft’s Germanist steadfastness and Strauss’s polyglot dialogue, respectively. The examination of their correspondences, diaries, scholarship and literary oeuvres demonstrates how counteractive writing practices helped confront concrete and metaphorical crises of language to produce compelling alternatives to literary silence, amnesia or paralysis that were prompted by cultural marginality and dislocation.

'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.