Hermaea. Neue Folge

This study examines the question of when and how German-language texts written between 1750 and 1930 refer to the literature of the Middle Ages. In a scalable reading, it performs a distant reading of medieval references in German-language literature, followed by an examination of the reception of medieval poetry. It then carries out a close reading of Friedrich Haug’s Minnesang reception

Since the eighteenth century, societies have been increasingly orienting the way they think and act around the future. This is not the result of a natural process, but can be attributed to a complex discursive formation: the modern temporal regime. This study outlines the positions toward this key concept of modernity taken by Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, and Gottfried Keller, which oscillate between affirmation and critique.

This study is the first to reconstruct the theoretical history of series formation in the modern era. It looks at forgotten frameworks in which the methodological and procedural knowledge of cultural and literary studies began to take shape prior to the formal establishment of these disciplines themselves did. It also delves into their historical development.

Berlin’s Neidhart Manuscript R (Lower Austria, ca. 1280) contains ten songs that are supplemented by verses written in the margin. These verses are testament to a variance of versions that has not been taken into account by any edition so far. This study explores these variants, thereby making an important contribution to the transmission history and textual criticism of Neidhart’s songs.

Research into the relationship between German-language tragedy and modernism around 1900 has been shaped by "rumors" of their incompatibility. This study challenges that idea and looks at dramatic works by Henrik Ibsen, Frank Wedekind, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal to show how crucial the production of tragedies – within the paradigm of Entbindung (disentanglement) – participated in fundamental considerations about modernity around 1900.

The numerous mysterious female characters who wander through Heine’s prose of the 1820s and 30s, belonging more to the sphere of art than reality, can be used to read the implicit poetics of those texts. This poetics is a movement of transition between "old" and "new" art. This study makes a contribution to our understanding of Heine’s modernity by conceptualizing transition as an element of reflection.

The furious text has not been an object of systematic analysis until now. In this volume, this analysis is based on an interdisciplinary definition of the emotion of fury itself. Text analyses thus provide insights that go beyond previous findings from the fields of poetics, rhetoric, linguistics, and psychology. Although this study takes up the theory of satire, it develops a new approach to categorize and analyze aggressive writing.

Against the backdrop of the social changes that took place during the saddle period, this volume presents one hundred years of dance in literature in all its facets, in particular in its functions for literature. Dance reveals itself to be a seismograph for the transformation of society and gender relations, as an inspiration for poetical concepts, and as a mirror of political changes.

This volume systematizes the political in recent contemporary literature. It incorporates political theory, methodologically expanding upon the philological analysis of selected narrative texts in order to characterize their thematic and aesthetic reorientation. By utilizing voices, perspectives, and narratives that have so far gone unheard, the texts examined here create literary spaces of political reflection in the sense of regulated debate.

Hans Blumenberg did not formulate a theory of reading, but in his dissertation of 1946–47 he had already established a connection between reception and theory formation. This can be traced through the history of metaphor from the “Book of Nature” to the late glosses. This study describes the importance of reading for Blumenberg’s writings, developing a post-hermeneutic concept of readability.

The Bible attributes musical talents to King David: he is not only a ruler, but also a singer, dancer, and psalmist. These attributes form the basis for the stylization of David as the epitome of the artist. This study examines the origin of this image and its variations in German-language literature. The “Hebrew Orpheus” proves to be a fixed figure in the discourse on art, where poets profile their own understanding of art.

As the understanding of subject and language changed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the concept of sincerity (Redlichkeit) was profoundly problematized. Rather than rejecting the term, this study develops a theory of rhetorical and performative sincerity that relies neither on the subject nor on propositional language. Close readings of literary texts show that this sincerity is a representational mode that reveals the possibility of ethical speech beyond the subject.

Narratological discourse has long marginalized the figure as a literary subject. Starting from such theoretical gaps, the author analyzes the words and actions of the figures in the texts by “Der Pleier,” and critically examines established narratological categories for their functionality in terms of the concept of “figure.”

Songs and rhymed couplets responding to political events are doubtless among the most productive texts of the Late Middle Ages. In the form of accounts, commentaries, and reports, they describe past and contemporary battles, sieges, and other important occurrences. Doreen Brandt has written the first study to consider various genres of event-related literature in their printed and written forms.

This study investigates the relationship between myth and rationality in modernist philosophical and literary discourse. Analyzing how the concept of myth was used around 1900, it examines Hermann Hesse’s (“myth as psychology”) and Thomas Mann’s (“myth plus psychology”) mythical narratives with reference to selected novels and stories in order to expose how their approaches and strategies in dealing with myth differed.

This study attempts to reconstruct Heiner Müller’s poetics of the grotesque in the context of literary history, interpreting it as a response to the crises, upheaval, and historical catastrophes of the 20^th century. This is the first such essay on an author who repeatedly made poetological statements in his writings and interviews but, unlike Brecht, Dürrenmatt, or Hacks, did not leave behind an explicit treatise on poetics.

The book proposes a system to describe narrative incoherencies in the 12^th century German epic. It shows that the constitution of the texts was largely influenced by the medial-pragmatic and cognitive frameworks of their reception. Their principles of coherence reflect a visual-auditory narrative practice that is characteristic of the transition between verbally communicated and scripturally received textuality.

This study investigates the communicational and constitutive dimensions of version *C of the Nibelungenlied and Klage as part of a “conversation” concerning appropriate forms of narration. It looks specifically at material findings, interrelational features of the Nibelungenlied and Klage, factors shaping their literarization, plus/minus material with a view to formal, substantive, and narrative aspects, and properties of their mediality.

The 19^th century was, in Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis, “addicted to dwelling.” That era’s sense of space – what August Schmarsow called its Raumgefühl – shaped the narratives of Thomas Mann. This study examines Mann’s literary concepts of space and interprets them less in terms of particular texts than as descriptions of material culture. It also explores the discourse, history, and ideology behind those concepts.

This examination of the history of theories of metaphor presents a new organizational framework for categorizing the various currents in the discourse, and also offers a detailed analysis of 24 groundbreaking theories. It places a particular emphasis on the cognitive theory of metaphor. All theories are correlated to one another and discussed in terms of their potential fruitfulness for literary scholarship.

Christina of Hane is a unique and little-known mystic. This is the very first comprehensive study on the late medieval text transmitting her Life ("Vita"). Adopting a multi-perspective approach, the first part of the study considers the handwritten manuscript while also discussing performative aspects of this mystic text. The second part of the study offers a new edition of the Life.

The Väterbuch [Lives of the Desert Fathers] is the first German translation of the writings of the early Christian desert monks. The book develops the historical roots of the German text and presents the individual parts of the Väterbuch. The study examines the transformations that took place in moving from Latin to the vernacular, casting light on ascetic literature in general as well as the features specific to the Väterbuch.

How closely interlinked are natural philosophy and the German-speaking literature of the Middle Ages? Looking specifically at the theory of the four elements, this volume seeks to answer this question by describing the connections between literature and general knowledge. Insights achieved by scholars working in Latin did not find occasional expression in vernacular literature; rather, they exerted a decisive influence on the German language.

Variations of proxy and substitution are a guiding theme running through the narrative structure of the Prose Lancelot that help constitute a new focus in character development and narrative technique. Elements of replaceability and representation are reflected in constellations of power, love, and friendship in the Arthurian world and the world of the Grail, suggesting inwardness and presence.

Hope originally meant anticipation of what is to come and was related mostly to the material here-and-now or a religious dimension in the beyond. By the modern era at the latest, however, this reading becomes problematic. Instead, literature and philosophy develop conceptions of hope that are increasingly characterized by ambivalence and paradox, conceptions that evoke the future in a mode of uncertainty.

Novels in the form of diaries exist since the early 18th century. They are defined by specific characteristics on a thematic, poetological and narratological level. For the first time texts from the 18th to the 20th century are considered as an autonomous genre within this study. The diary novel experimented for over 300 years with textual-narrative procedures which are regarded as innovative even today.

For the first time, this volume provides a synoptic presentation of the approx. 6000 verses of the Early Middle High German “Genesis”. The texts are based on the three manuscript versions in Vienna, Klagenfurt, and Vorau, accompanied by color illustrations from the illustration cycle in the Klagenfurt manuscript – which have been inserted in the appropriate places in the text, as have the spaces left blank for images from the Vienna manuscript.

Although things play an ‘active’ and visible role in a number of texts, especially older works, they have rarely been examined by narratologists in their own right. This comparative study of the Eneasroman, the Roman d’Eneas and the Aeneid reveals the interpretive value of deliberate attention to objects. In addition, it also suggests starting points for their systematic categorization.

Despite the richness of its facets, the short religious epic has been largely neglected by scholars until now. This study explores this literary phenomenon using a multi-perspectival descriptive model. Extensive detailed case studies provide basic information and present the genre in its broader literary historical and systematic context.

Job has inspired German literature like no other Old Testament figure. This volume looks at variants of the story of Job, reading the Book of Job as a meta-myth about literature that has symbolized mastery of contingent fate. Each of the Job texts from the 12^th through the 20^th centuries offers us a contemporary answer to the question: how much freedom of action does man have, and how much of his fate is determined by a ‘higher power’?

The 13th century poet Bruder Wernher is considered the successor of Walther von der Vogelweide in the history of Sangspruchdichtung. For many years, the only access to Wernher’s Sangsprüche was the complete edition published in 1904/5. The present edition has reedited Bruder Wernher’s works in keeping with today’s textual standards.

Middle High German “courtship tales” combine a narrative model that recurs in many variations with different versions of the confrontation between Christians and Saracens. The present study analyzes the inter-religious issues exposed in this group of texts from the combined perspectives of narratology and cultural studies, and examines their discursive interconnections.

This study elucidates the previously undefined notion of the “archival novel.” It establishes Goethe’s idea of the “aggregate” as a tool for generating order and avoiding interconnection. With sections on “archival narrative” and “archival writing,” the study develops frames for investigation that may well come to shape the basic vocabulary of novel analysis. The book contributes to discussion about the literary genre of the novel as well as to research on Goethe’s work.

How can one narrate intangible aspects of a character, such as a person’s inner life? Often the concreteness that is lacking in the inner world is communicated through symbols or allegory. But despite literature’s focus on the inner life, the models and concepts of scholastic anthropology were not applied. This study seeks to explain why this was so.

From the time it emerged in the 18th century until its collapse in the 20th century, the model of the bourgeois father held a central place in politics and literature. For the first time, the present study systematically examines the history of this construct with a focus on the interplay between the mechanisms of paternal authority and the emotionalization of the family as part of the bourgeois value system. The familial structures portrayed in literature are acknowledged as important blueprints for the representation of sovereignty and for the interplay between government and society.

Originating around 1400, this sermon cycle about the Eight Beatitudes is ascribed to Heinrich von St. Gallen. It is one of the few pieces of textual evidence surviving from the German sermon in pre-Hussite Prague. The present publication is the first critical edition of the sermon cycle. It sheds light on the cultural environment of the author and discusses the connections between the sermons and other works attributed to Heinrich von St. Gallen.

Born at the critical moment of China's emergence into the modern world, Feng Zhi (1905–93), the founder of German Studies at Peking University and creator of the Chinese sonnet, was confronted with the three thousand year history of his home culture, where he felt himself ‘in exile’. Inspired by his examination of Western literature and philosophy, Feng Zhi transformed the ancient legend of Wu Zixu – a spectacular story of revenge – into his novel Wu Zixu (1946), a modern lyrical allegory of the wartime ‘lost’ generation's search for its home. Crystalizing attitudes of the 1940s Chinese avant-garde towards the transmitted canon and promoting the view that a historically desired ‘Chinese Renaissance’ depends upon a blending of Eastern and Western concepts, Feng Zhi's work leads the way to a literary (counter) revolution.

Ingeborg Bachmann’s Berlin speech Ein Ort für Zufälle (“A Place for Coincidences”), given on the occasion of accepting the Georg Büchner prize in 1964, remains an enigmatic, difficult to classify document of post-war German-language literature, and has been the subject of considerable controversy. The present commentary provides an introduction to the complex aesthetics of the text, taking into consideration its background in time, culture, and historical attitudes, along with its system of intertextual allusions. The commentary provides readers and scholars of Bachmann with a compendium of different interpretations of her work, and should stimulate them to seek new ways of understanding it.

This study explores Heine’s complex reading of Byron and demonstrates the inadequacy of the notion of world-weariness (Weltschmerz) as a dominant paradigm for comparing these two writers. On the basis of comprehensive textual analysis, Alexandra Böhm suggests that between 1815 and 1930, during the threshold period between Romanticism and Realism, both Byron and Heine developed a “poetics of intervening art” (Poetik eingreifender Kunst). This performative poetics not only casts Heine’s reading of Byron in a new light but also serves to more precisely situate the relationship of both of these writers to Romantic positions.

This study shows for the first time how performative historical writing emerged as a historical necessity in the German-speaking world of the late 18th century. In the long term this development paved the way for modern historiographic narrative. It discusses texts that use representational strategies to express the essentials of the course of history. The book is aimed at those interested in the history of literature and historical writing and also at those interested in literary and historical theory and historical philosophy.

The study investigates Eulenspiegel, the European bestseller of the Early Modern Age. The history of its dissemination in England shows how strongly book printing there in the 16th century was predominated by German printers and sellers and demonstrates how a ‛German’ figure was received in England. The study presents that period's fascination with Eulenspiegel using a number of examples of translations showing their interconnection with the English version. Here for the first time, an edition translated into German and including variants reflects the entire English tradition of the 16th century.

Rumelant of Saxony [Rumelant von Sachsen] was a traveling poet-minstrel of Sangsprüche in the second half of the 13th century and was one of the most typical and productive representatives of this genre. This is the first complete edition of his texts: Besides the many Sprüche it also contains three Minnelieder ‑ little attention has been given to them until now ‑ as well as some later Meisterlieder which have also been handed down under the name of Rumelant. This fully annotated edition also provides modern German translations of all of the texts.

Using exemplary historical scenarios, the present cultural history traces the transdisciplinary development of a psychosomatic discourse between the 18th and 20th centuries, thus closing a gap in research. The human being as a complete entity made up of body and soul is not only a topic for medicine, but is also of significance in literature and philosophy. The exchange processes between literature and knowledge are registered in concrete examples, and they demonstrate literature both as a cause of illness and a cure and as a method of representation and cognition.

No 19th century writer in German has been the subject of such intensive reception by modern literati as Adalbert Stifter. His order of things, the discovery of slowness and his silent inscrutability still exercise a fascination today. In these studies, central works of Stifter’s are analysed and the hitherto underrated moment of irony is highlighted. This irony leads to the supposedly model heroes and educational stories being at the same time debunked, and this suspension of standards leads time and again to unexpectedly comic effects.

"Harmoniously opposed" is a fundamental phrase in Hölderlin's poetology. Until now, however, there has been no systematic study consistently following this central representational structure through Hölderlin's poetic and poetological writings. The present monograph attempts to remedy this deficiency by taking the fundamental structure of "representation", which has been a determining factor in Western philosophy and literature since Classical Antiquity , and developing it anew with reference to Hölderlin and defining its far-reaching implications for poetry and poetology more precisely than has been the case in previous research.

The function of the figure of Gauvain underwent an historical change. As a courtly character in the classical romances, he reacted in the interests of Arthurian society to its deficiencies, so that the action provoked by the disturbances came to rest. In the later romances, a process of emancipation in the role of the protagonist sets in. The personal motivation connected with this role stood in conflict with the function of the figure of Gauvain as established in the tradition of the genre, and this led to problems of causality in the texts. Despite this process of emancipation, however, the figure remained remarkably stable in a consistent narrative model. In this model, Chrétien de Troyes had set the figure up as an antagonist to that of the protagonist and the figure of Keus, the other courtly character. This model describes the deployment and of the various figures and their tendency to act in particular ways, and could be verified in all of Chrétien’s romances as a basic structure of Gauvain’s actions, but showed itself to be a particular motivation for his actions in the romances with Gauvain's quest.

In his late novels, Goethe formulates a profound critique of language and thus challenges his own capacity to represent. Goethe’s fundamental scepticism about language derives from an irresolvable ambiguity of words coupled with limitations on their expressiveness; in the case of Elective Affinities and Journeyman Years this leads to the conception of an open work of art. Using detailed textual analysis, Christian Mittermüller reconstructs a hitherto scarcely recognised connection between scepticism about language and poetic theory, and in so doing opens up a new avenue for approaching Goethe’s late works.

The study takes as its subject the historical literary and cultural upheavals which led to the appearance of books of German literature in the vernacular. It examines them against the background of present-day theoretical discussions, taking critical account of the findings of international research on texts and manuscripts, and links these for the first time in the study of German-language works with approaches from paleography, codicology and general cultural history. The reliability of the evaluation is guaranteed by using an extraordinarily wide database – Wolf not only considers the whole of the German literature available in the vernacular from 12th and 13th century manuscripts, but also draws on a qualified selection of parallel texts in Latin and Old French.

Against the background of the recent revival of interest evinced by Germanic studies in the medieval Order of German Knights, this study sets out to cast light on the various insights to be gained from an examination of the literature produced in the framework of this Order. The approach proceeds from the Biblical foundations of corporate identity within the brotherhood, as set out in its rules and statutes. As a result, it is in a position to relate the interpretation of the two central literary genres favored by the Order – chronicles and Biblical epics – more closely to one another than has been the case so far, drawing on selected case studies for the purpose.

The study conveys insights into the creative strategies employed by German romance authors of the high Middle Ages in the adaptation of their usually French sources. With reference to Heinrich von Veldeke, noted by his contemporaries for his pioneering status, it indicates that the adaptation process was influenced by firmly established rhetorical and poetic principles that the scholarly authors habitually complied with. While this restricted the scope of their poetic license, it also encouraged their creativity. It was in fact precisely their command of this rule-guided poetic repertory that enabled them to produce great literature.

The modernist awareness of contingency is variously prefigured in German narrative discourse around 1800. In the course of the accounts of their lives, the characters in the novels »Agathon« (Wieland), »Siebenkäs« (Jean Paul), and »Godwi« (Brentano) are repeatedly confronted with coincidences befalling them, while the texts themselves are full of reflections indicating that the order and meaning they impose on the material could always have been different. The study examines the various modes of enactment employed in connection with narrative contingency, using the contingency concept to take a new perspective on the major literary epoch around 1800.

This study is devoted to the texts deriving from Hartmann von Aue's »Gregorius«: Arnold of Lübeck's »Gesta Gregorii Peccatoris«, the hexameter version »Gregorius Peccator«, the legend »Gregorius auf dem Stein« from »The Lives of the Saints«, and the exempla »De Gregorio« and »Gregorius de grote sunder«. It indicates linguistic and topical commonalities, foregrounds the adaptive procedures employed, and investigates changes in the circles of recipients. With the exception of Arnold's »Gesta«, the different instances of productive reception are presented in new editions of the text versions closest to Hartmann's original.

With reference to the reception accorded to Freidank, this study investigates the transformation of an historical author into a figure inscribed into cultural memory with a clearly delineated set of features and competencies. Initially no more than a reference in a corpus of edifying Sprüche, Freidank's name gradually turned into a symbol of veracity and God-fearing living in the course of a long receptive process extending from the 14th to the 17th century. Freidank thus attained the status of an authority. Similar processes of semiotization and ascriptions of significance are observable in the reception accorded to Wolfram von Eschenbach and Neidhart. Accordingly, these figures are drawn upon for purposes of comparison.

The problem of transgression is central to the six case studies discussed in the book, three of them relating to literary works (Peter Altenberg's »Ashantee« (1897), Hanns Heinz Ewers' »Mamaloi« (1907), Ernst Jünger's »Afrikanische Spiele« (1936)), the other three to real-life cases (Franz Bratuscha (1900-1904), Paul Trömel (1913), 'degenerate girls' (1913)). They are assembled here for an investigation of the aesthetic potential of the transitory, independently of whether it manifests itself in fact or fiction. The methodological aim of the study is to demonstrate how fruitful a fusion of issues from literary and cultural studies can be.

One of the striking features of »Faust II« is the way Goethe has incorporated a multiplicity of knowledge elements into this work of his old age. The study examines the function of this abundance of allusions, coining the term 'archival poetology' to designate the process of creative alienation and knowledge acquisition involved. In so doing, it concentrates on three aspects. First it relates Goethe's approach to the history of knowledge and science at the time. Subsequently it inquires into the procedure employed in poeticizing the knowledge referred to, and finally it enlarges on the poetological function of this knowledge.

The study traces a development extending from Nietzsche to Brecht in which traditional identities lost their sustaining power. The ongoing disintegration of ordered structures, traditional faith, or social position left the self without the support and sustenance they had hitherto supplied. The free-wheeling individual was set adrift in a heterogeneous environment, and self-determination became an imperative. This uncertainty was aesthetically fruitful in that it engendered innovative uses of language. At the same time, however, it also spawned a quest for new 'imperatives' promising stability and security. Among those imperatives were the totalitarian political parties of the 20th century.

In his works Goethe not only creates symbols. He also creates heroes who create their own symbols. The »Lehrjahre« is a case in point. Here the protagonist invents the world, both consciously and unconsciously, as a system of signs enabling him to empower himself of the outer world as a product of his inner world. This is illustrated by a semiotic analysis of the symbolism of the veil. This symbolic ploy represents a consistent reflection of the crisis-ridden formation of identity in the initially narcissistic hero, Wilhem Meister, and traces the way it evolves through the subsequent stages of his career. At the same time, it also pinpoints the interplay between ethos and eros.

Goethe's libretti represent one of the last major lacunae in scholarly research on the author. Throughout his life Goethe took a keen and productive interest in all the European varieties of opera, as a connoisseur, impresario, and librettist. 17 texts for use as musical drama have come down to us. They make up an extensive corpus, and contrary to received thinking they are closely connected with the author's canonical works. Goethe's achievements as a librettist are especially well reflected in his work on Faust. »Faust II« may legitimately be regarded as a species of musical theatre that is both an effective libretto and a drama that can stand on its own without music.

The present study examines authorship identity patterns in the works of Clemens Brentano (1778-1842), inquiring specifically into the function of poetological and transcendental-philosophical models of androgyny. The confusion of gender identities is observable not only in Brentano's fictional writings but also plays a significant role in his letters to Achim von Arnim and Sophie Mereau. The study interprets it as a principle of literary structure and situates it in the context of narratological analysis.

Taking the »Melusine« romance as an example, this study compares the conditions governing literary production and reception in late medieval France and Germany. In so doing, it also addresses fundamental questions pertaining to the linguistic, geographical, human, and institutional prerequisites for cultural transfer. The conclusion is that comprehensive culture-historical research into Franco-German literary relations in the Middle Ages requires not only a philological analysis of texts, but also a close historical study of the book forms that acted as agents of transmission.

The cultural and individual conditions governing the production and reception of modernist literature are reflected in an almost material way in the tiny pencil manuscripts and the fair copies in ink that are part and parcel of Robert Walser's (1878-1956) writing system. The study discusses the methodological approaches and the concepts with which these documents can be made the subject of scholarly examination in the realm of literary studies. Without restricting itself to a purely philological exploration of writing processes, it reconstructs the individual, material-bound poetics behind Walser's writing.

With astounding tenacity, though hitherto largely unremarked, reflection on the French Revolution in German drama of the two centuries following it has made consequential use of the play-within-a-play form. In this process, the revolutionary 'drama of history' has been transposed into an aesthetic mode which, in this context, gains a heightened epistemic significance for the perception of history. By aesthetically demythologizing the revolutionary myth, the self-referential drama achieves a comprehensive critique of the modern understanding of history. In the last instance, this critique also thematizes the limits of the dramatic form itself.

In his »Parsifal«, Wolfram experiments with different concepts of femininity and masculinity and in so doing engages with the schemata of thought and argumentation found in the immediate literary tradition (Heinrich von Veldecke, Hartmann von Aue, Chrétien de Troyes). With reference to the Gawain books, the study shows how in act of narration Wolfram deconstructs the existing conventionalized literary models underlying the portrayal of gender relations and establishes a new form of inter-gender relationship in the framework of the courtly romance.

The subject of this volume is historicist practice in the perception of history and the development that superseded it. Both Ranke and Droysen as well as Fontane in his texts on the war of 1870/71 assimilate their descriptive procedures to 19th-century public historical culture, which was based on a number of medial innovations. But by drawing upon the contemporary psychopathology of trauma, the romantic poetics of the arabesque and aesthetic elements in early photography, Fontane's late narratives indicate the limitations of this culture and map out a new texture of historiography.

The study analyzes strategies serving the constitution of meaning in »Reinfried and Apollonius«, proceeding from there to propose a new definition of what it is that significantly distinguishes romances on courtly love (Minne) and adventure from other verse romances. As specific expressions of aristocratic identity and existence, courtly love and knightly adventure are dovetailed with the topic of bridal wooing to reflect the paradigmatic status of the theme of power legitimization and the visibly exemplary nature of rulers and their life-styles against the background of the history of Christian redemption. As »Apollonius« was designed as a riposte to »Reinfried«, the two romances are clearly seen to stand in a discourse relationship to each other.

The study discusses Albrecht Dürer's (1471-1528) minor writings (family records, letters, poems in rhyming couplets, dedications, and the »Diary of a Journey to the Netherlands«) against the background of comparable contemporary texts and inquires into their function and status. Dürer's systematic use of formulaic elements taken from Early High German text varieties for his own interests or for ludic purposes casts light on the conditions governing literary and authorial activity and the way those conditions reflect the role of writing in the transition from one class of (educated) society to another in the period around 1500.

The study is an attempt to establish a productive connection between two methodologically incompatible approaches, discourse analysis and hermeneutics. It examines the reciprocal impact of processes operative in the formation of literary meaning on the one hand, and scientific and scholarly discourse(s) on visual perception on the other. Developments in the discourse on visuality are placed over and against literary texts drawing upon and forming a part of that discourse: Schiller's »Geisterseher«, Büchner's »Leonce und Lena«, Raabe's »Chronik der Sperlingsgasse«, Przybyszewski's »Requiem«, Musil's »Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß«, and Kafka's »Trial«.

Else Lasker-Schüler's prose works cover the period from 1906 to 1937. Their multifarious links with central literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic works of the modern age demonstrate the degree to which they are embedded in different contemporaneous discourses. The perspective they cast on modern discourse patterns is a very original one, linking figures representing sovereignty with the categories gender and body. Royal figures and powerholders show a marked inclination to absolutize their power by eradicating all (gender) difference. The enactment of such self-creation fantasms aimed at collapsing symbol and body delineates the poetological and the historical/political dimensions of a radical crisis of representation. The study draws on discourse analysis, cultural anthropology and psycho-semiotics for its arguments, explicitly mapping its frame of reference to encompass historical and biographical aspects (First World War, Zionism, National Socialist persecution of the Jews, exile, etc.) and showing how the ethics of difference outlined in these texts relates to Jewish tradition.

The study proceeds from a close reading of the 'blood in the snow' episode in Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'Parzival'. The perception and knowledge-formation processes described in this scene are interpreted against the backdrop of early scholastic theories of perception and epistemology. The second part of the study inquires more generally into the significance of perception and knowledge in Wolfram's work, exploring this issue first in terms of the plot and then from the narrator perspective. This ultimately poses the question of the poetics of the 'Parzival' romance.

Schiller's dramatic fragments offer a largely unexplored spectrum of instances of the way Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805) addressed a problem he was crucially engaged with: the relationship between person and state. They also document a process which can be described as the literary modification of an idealistic philosophy of government. Proceeding from Schiller's own theory of state power and government, the study investigates three dramatic models: the elevated drama of idealistic thinking on political power and government; the drama of conflict with the law; and drama revolving around a pretender to the throne. There is also discussion of the synthesis of various innovative concepts in a doppelgänger drama doing justice to the complexity of the issue by assigning to the idea of person and state legal spheres which, though legitimate in themselves, are also mutually exclusive.

The study analyses early Romantic models of individuality and their relevance in the literature and philosophy of aesthetic modernism after 1945. Starting with Novalis, the self as a work of art is delineated in the way it manifests itself in figural constellations of androgynity, role-change, sex-change and various forms of love. Authors like Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and Michel Foucault have directly taken their bearings from Novalis in plumbing the potentialities of a liberated creation of the self under the conditions dictated by modern power constellations.

The perception of a foreign country is largely influenced by the existence and reception of literary stereotypes in a given culture. This was certainly true of the image of Spain entertained by 18th century German-speaking authors, whose depictions of Spain underwent an extreme transformation. The present study looks at the origins, dissemination and function of pre-Romantic images of Spain in German-speaking literature, concentrating in its analyses on non-fictional genres such as travel literature, dictionary articles and works on Spanish literature, all of which were central in propagating and disseminating both scholarly and popular views of Spain.

The study examines a significant and extensive corpus of late medieval historical songs and poems from the 14th century to the Reformation at present consigned to the research limbo of an ill-defined area somewhere between German studies, public communication studies, and history and referred to over the last 150 years under the misleading heading 'historical folk songs'. After a detailed reexamination of these texts and the way they relate to specific events in history, evidence is adduced to demonstrate that we are in the presence of a genre in its own right, characterized by purpose-guided aesthetic principles, specific functions, and a high degree of public impact. It is the genre of historisch-politische Ereignisdichtung (literally: historico-political event literature).

The life-stories of problematic central figures as recounted in Moritz' »Anton Reiser«, Keller's »Der grüne Heinrich« and Raabe's »Akten des Vogelsangs« serve as a basis for mapping out ambitiously extensive topologies of memory. Behind the narrative »I remember« ploy, topologically structured models of the cultural organization and imaging of knowledge are discernible. Literary com-memoration makes one thing clear: prior to any kind of individual materialization, memory requires an archive of images to draw on, an archive containing the rhetorical formulas of both mythological and christological initiation narratives as well as of iconography. The literary figuration of »modern« memory thus calls for reexamination and reevaluation.

Starting from a discussion of selected characteristic 18th century theories of empirical research and (nature) philosophy, the study undertakes an analysis of mineralogical motifs in the works of Novalis. His poetological interpretations of scientific models are examined in the theoretic context of his daringly experimental encyclopedic vision of the sciences (Enzyklopädistik). Novalis' speculative conception of self-consciousness and his sound knowledge of chemistry and physics form the foundation from which he develops innovative approaches to the poetic construction of reality.

Johann von Würzburg's "Wilhelm von Österreich" is a late representative of the courtly romance. Here it receives attention for the first time against the background of its literary-historical context and in terms of its complexity as a genre hybrid. At a time when didactic minor epic poetry, allegory, and the historicalization of courtly literature were all coming to a head, Johann interwove and set off against one another motivic strains and structural elements of Minnerede, romance, and historiography. The author sets out to trace exactly how he did this and also to show the lengths gone to in the reception of his work in the 14th to 16th centuries, from the manuscript scribes all the way to Hans Sachs, to impose a more unified character on the work. The annex contains a hitherto unedited Minneklage (love plaint).

Departing from Nietzsche's revolutionary reinterpretation of Greek civilization, the study analyzes the creative transformation of Greek tragedy, as the canonic model of Western theatre, by a wide range of European and American dramatists (Hofmannsthal, Jahnn, Hauptmann and Brecht; Cocteau, Gide, Giraudoux, Anouilh and Sartre; Jeffers, O'Neill, Eliot, among others). Detailed interpretations (juxtaposing modern versions, their Greek 'pre-texts' and 17/18th century variants) are intertwined with theoretical evaluations from an intertextual and cultural-historical perspective, to assess the possibility and meaning of tragedy within the realm of secular modernism.

This study of the role of the aristocratic family in vernacular literature of the Middle Ages looks at its chosen subject from the viewpoint of the history of mentalities. It traces the literary treatment of family knowledge, family awareness, and family constructions. In so doing it pursues two lines of inquiry, first the significance of the historical aristocratic family as initiator, promoter, and subject of vernacular texts, and second the typologically very variously contoured literary images of family and kinship and their historical implications.

Up to the present, little scholarly attention has been given to the earliest versions of the "Eulenspiegel" material, largely because research has concentrated on the figure generally thought to be the author - the Brunswick customs officer Hermann Bote. These initial versions originated in the early 16th century from the workshop of the successful Strasbourg printer Johannes Grüninger. This study of the early prints employs bibliographics and literary criticism in equal measure to show that the "Eulenspiegel" did not in fact take shape in Bote's Brunswick excise office but received the profile that started it on its worldwide literary career in Grüninger's print-shop in Strasbourg.

This edition provides access to the work of a prominent 'minor' - and at the same time typical - representative of Middle High German Sangspruchdichtung from the second half of the 13th century. It reflects recent thinking on textual editing and text critique in that the standardized text takes each Spruch from a master manuscript, with any deviations from it being characterized as such. The edition ensures ultimate verifiability by means of the critical apparatus(es) and the reproduction of the form(s) in which the texts have been handed down to us. In addition, the translation and the commentary provide a seamless record of the editor's understanding/interpretation of the text.

In the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, the Latin prose romance "Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolfi" was taken as the basis for a number of vernacular adaptations. The subject matter was translated and interpreted in a variety of different genres. In terms of transmission and textual history, a second narrative strain, deriving from the courtship epic "Salman und Morolf" is loosely connected with the first. The volume describes the way this group of works has been handed down to us and interprets the general tendencies underlying the various adaptations. A series of literary testimonies from the 6th to the 20th century shows the topicality of the Marcolf theme through the ages. The volume also contains a scholarly edition of one of the manuscript forms (1469) of the vernacular prose romance.

The study investigates the 13th and 14th century works handed down to us under the name of Tannhäuser. Philological analysis and exhaustive interpretation are employed to achieve a reasoned stance vis-à-vis unresolved Tannhäuser problems and to probe some of the things hitherto taken for granted in literary historiography. In addition the attempt is made to provide a convincing overall characterization of Tannhäuser as an authorial personality, not least with a view to reexamining the scope and limitations of an author-oriented approach to medieval literature. The annex contains Tannhäuser's "Bußlied" (Song of Penance) and "Hofzucht" (The Perfect Courtier) making them available for the first time complete with modern German translations.

The study examines Hadamar's love allegory in the forms in which it has been handed down to us, with special reference to modifications of content and stylistic tendencies. Proceeding from a discussion of the complicated transmission situation, the author demonstrates that "Jagd" (hunt) should best be regarded as a ,variable' text. In the course of its history, the number and order of the stanzas was expanded, rearranged and then abridged. This is chiefly accounted for by the associative nature of its structure, which in its turn expresses a desire to achieve as multi-faceted an allegorical depiction of the problematic of courtly love (Minne) as possible. The study provides full annotation of selected passages of central importance and sets out to make a contribution both to the philological study of medieval texts and the discussion on allegory.

This study undertakes a re-interpretation of love as it figures in the prose "Lancelot". By means of close reading and comparison with other texts forming the tradition in which the work stands, it is possible to show that the love between Lancelot and Guinevere is strongly conditioned by the way it relates to Arthurian rule. Thus the view of the trilogy as a secular account of Arthurian empire necessarily takes pride of place over a primarily spiritual interpretation of the work.

This study examines prose works from four different epochs of Clemens Brentano's career (1778-1842) with a view to tracing the procedures of allegorisation, allegoresis and hermeneutics employed by the author and revealing the continuity in approach and method from the author's early period all the way up to his final works. The works discussed range from the early fragment "Der Sänger" to the late Märchen (fairy-tale) "Fanferlieschen Schönefüßchen", with interpretations of the "Märchen von dem Myrtenfräulein" and the "Mehreren Wehmüllern" pointing up the specifically Romantic profile of the author in his middle period. Explication of Brentano's imagery and his combinatorial prowess, identification of quotations and allusions and reference to parallel motifs in the author's oeuvre as a whole are the main concerns of the painstaking philological analysis provided here. Taken together they richly illustrate the complexity of Brentano's highly artificial text structures.

The author first discusses the fundamental relationship, in Hebrew writing systems, between script and sound, in particular the investigation of this relationship in texts of the past. In the first major section, an exhaustive description of three texts from around 1600 serves as a fixation point for a presentation, based on some 70 texts, of the development of the writing and sound systems from the oldest texts to the demise of written West Yiddish in Germany around 1800. Main subject of the second major section is the gradual distancing of the German component of West Yiddish from all varieties of German. A comparison of the phonetic system with the other linguistic levels shows that West Yiddish achieved its independence from German most readily at the semantic level, more slowly in phonology. In the final chapter the author tries to organize all observed graphic and phonic speech changes according to a few pragmatically intelligible categories.