'Relations stop nowhere' : the common literary foundations of German and American literature 1830-1917 / Hugh Ridley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ridley, Hugh.

Series:

Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 109.

Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 0929-6999 ; 109

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

German literature--History and criticism.

German literature.

American literature--German influences.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (318 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book attempts for the first time a comparative literary history of Germany and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its material does not come from the familiar overlaps of individual German and American writers, but from the work of the literary historians of the two countries after 1815, when American intellectuals took Germany as a model for their project to create an American national literature. The first part of the book examines fundamental structural affinities between the two literary histories and the common problems these caused, especially in questions of canon, realism, aesthetics and in the marginalization of popular and women’s writing. In the second part, significant figures whose work straddle the two literatures – from Sealsfield and Melville, Whitman and Thomas Mann to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bellow – are discussed in detail, and the arguments of the first part are shown in their relevance to understanding major writers. This book is not merely comparative in scope: it shows that only international comparison can explain the course of American literary history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. As recent developments in American Studies explore the multi-cultural and ‘hybrid’ nature of the American tradition, this book offers evidence of the dependencies which linked American and German national literary history.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Preface

Introduction to National Literatures

The Early Years of German and American Literary History

Literary History and Democratic Nation-Building

Democracy and Realism

Hunting for American Aesthetics

Exclusions from the Canon

Literary History and Anthropology

The American Heart of Darkness: Charles Sealsfield and the West

American Idylls beyond Buffalo Bill

Emerson in the German and American traditions

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-308) and index.

ISBN:

94-012-0423-3

1-4294-8118-8

OCLC:

166342570

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401204231 DOI