Introduction: Heinrich von Kleist’s Life and Work

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Introduction: Heinrich von Kleist’s Life and Work 1
4. Critical Approaches
5. Jupiterists and Alkmenists: Amphitryon as an Example of How Kleist’s Texts Read Interpreters 21
6. Kleist’s Penthesilea: Battleground of Gendered Discourses 43
7. Language and Form
8. On Structures in Kleist 63
9. Strange News: Kleist’s Novellas 81
10. The Eye of the Beholder: Kleist’s Visual Poetics of Knowledge 103
11. The Performative Turn of the Beautiful: “Free Play” of Language and the “Unspeakable Person” 123
12. Intellectual Paradigms
13. The Facts of Life: Kleist’s Challenge to Enlightenment Humanism (Lessing) 141
14. “Betwixt a false reason and none at all”: Kleist, Hume, Kant, and the “Thing in Itself” 165
15. Themes and Motifs
16. Changing Color: Kleist’s “Die Verlobung in St. Domingo” and the Discourses of Miscegenation 191
17. Ripe Moments and False Climaxes: Thematic and Dramatic Configurations of the Theme of Death in Kleist’s Works 209
18. “Mein ist die Rache spricht der Herr”: Violence and Revenge in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist 227
19. Contributors 249
20. Index 251