Volume 26, Issue 1

The scope of Early Modern Demonology is universal, for the perceived threat of the devil is omnipresent, stretching through time and space. This article examines various utilizations of the description of central and south American indigenous peoples in demonological discourse. By means of three closely related examples, I will demonstrate the discursive conflation of deviant behavior in Europe and in America through comparisons and transferences: Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie des Sorciers (1580), its German translation by Johann Fischart (1581/1586), and Jean de Léry’s writings, especially his Histoire d’un voyage (1578/1585). Within this discursive nexus, Léry compares the American Indigenes to European Catholics, whereas Bodin compares them to European witches - and Fischart completes this argumentative triangle by calling for European Catholics to be held accountable for comparable acts in the same way as European witches.

In the late 18 th century, a new genre emerged in German literature: the historical drama novel. Presenting historic events through the speech of their actors, the historical drama novel sets new accents in the field of literary historiography. Functionally, the dialogical mode correlates with a concept of evidence in which historiographical and poetological premises of the late Enlightenment intersect. On the basis of exemplary novels, this article scrutinizes the conceptual reference horizon of the historical drama novel. The focus thus lies on the conditions and implications of a hybrid genre that displays the interactions of late Enlightened historiography and poetics on a literary form level.

The article investigates Gustav Freytag’s dissertation De initiis scenicae poesis apud Germanos [On the beginnings of dramatic poetry in Germany] and his habilitation De Hrosuitha poetria [On the poetess Hrotsvitha], written and published in 1838 and 1839, respectively. Usually disregarded in analyses of Freytag’s oeuvre as insignificant minor texts or pointless Latin writings among his otherwise exclusively German historiographical and literary production, they serve, in a nutshell, as early comprehensive samples of his life-long approach to cultural historiography and German literature. More precisely, one could term them the ›groundwork‹ constitutive for many of his later efforts as a historian and author. Apart from dissecting Freytag’s qualification papers in this respect for the first time, the article also expands on the institutional framework of early nineteenth-century university education in Germany and its upheld practice of Latin scientific discourse.

This article demonstrates that Gottfried Benn’s critical reflections on physics and mathematics in his prose writings between 1927-1933 were substantially inspired by a 1926 book entitled Der Zusammenbruch der Wissenschaft und der Primat der Philosophie and authored by the philosopher of science Hugo Dingler, an ardent opponent of Albert Einstein’s relativity theory who came to play a leading role in the movement known as Deutsche Physik during the Third Reich. This underexplored dimension of Benn’s science critique attests to the depth of his involvement in the intellectual-ideological discourse accompanying the emergence of National Socialism. The historical unfolding of Benn’s relation to physics and mathematics after 1933, however, highlights the shared vulnerability of expressionism and these ›exact sciences‹ to being interchangeably denounced as ›abstract‹, ›degenerate‹ and ›Jewish‹ on the one hand and the divergent fates of art and natural science under National Socialism on the other. This is demonstrated by way of a new reading of the essay Bekenntnis zum Expressionismus, published in November 1933, where Benn surprisingly moved away from the critique of modern physics and mathematics and towards an identification of expressionism with these fields.

This article is focused on a practice in interpretive texts that is as common and unavoidable as it is rarely explored: the practice of referring to the fictional world of literary texts. It presents an approach to conceptualize and analyse this practice. Instead of the category ›describing versus interpreting‹ usually used in systematic studies, smaller-scale categories more oriented towards the linguistic surface of the texts are proposed in order to distinguish the referring acts and to be able to capture their diversity. For this purpose, it is useful to ask how the references relate to the literary text and which speech act is in the centre of attention in each case. The article is based on the analysis of a larger corpus of literary interpretation texts and aims at a better understanding of the professional practice.