Download or read book The Virginal Mother in German Culture written by Lauren Nossett and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Virginal Mother in German Culture presents an innovative and thorough analysis of the contradictory obsession with female virginity and idealization of maternal nature in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Lauren Nossett explores how the complex social ideal of woman as both a sexless and maternal being led to the creation of a unique figure in German literature: the virginal mother. At the same time, she shows that the literary depictions of virginal mothers correspond to vilified biological mother figures, which point to a perceived threat in the long nineteenth century of the mother’s procreative power. Examining the virginal mother in the first novel by a German woman (Sophie von La Roche), canonical texts by Goethe, nineteenth-century popular fiction, autobiographical works, and Thea von Harbou’s novel Metropolis and Fritz Lang’s film by the same name, this book highlights the virginal mother at pivotal moments in German history and cultural development: the entrance of women into the literary market, the Goethezeit, the foundation of the German Empire, and the volatile Weimar Republic. The Virginal Mother in German Culture will be of interest to students and scholars of German literature, history, cultural and social studies, and women’s studies.
Download or read book The Virginal Mother in German Literature written by Lauren Nossett and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representations of female virginity and motherhood have a long and complex history in German literature and culture, but little attention has been given to how these contradictory ideologies have manifested in a recurring figure: the virginal mother. A young, chaste woman who provides unpaid care for children not her own and simultaneously practices her maternal skills before consummating marriage, this character reflects the social ideal of woman as both a maternal and sexless being and is influential in perpetuating a moral and social standard for women. This dissertation explores the development of the virginal mother from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century and argues that the virginal mother reveals a discontinuity in the prevailing discourse of maternal nature by showing that mothering is not only a skill that needs to be taught, but also a concept highly susceptible to ideological manipulation. Sexualized, but not sexual; maternal, but not a biological mother, this figure represents an ideal of femininity. At the same time, it serves as a vehicle to explore the contradictory gender ideologies associated with the rise of the middle class and the role of female labor in the German family and nation throughout the long nineteenth century.
Download or read book Adulterous Nations written by Tatiana Kuzmic and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Adulterous Nations, Tatiana Kuzmic enlarges our perspective on the nineteenth-century novel of adultery, showing how it often served as a metaphor for relationships between the imperialistic and the colonized. In the context of the long-standing practice of gendering nations as female, the novels under discussion here—George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, along with August Šenoa’s The Goldsmith’s Gold and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis—can be understood as depicting international crises on the scale of the nuclear family. In each example, an outsider figure is responsible for the disruption experienced by the family. Kuzmic deftly argues that the hopes, anxieties, and interests of European nations during this period can be discerned in the destabilizing force of adultery. Reading the work of Šenoa and Sienkiewicz, from Croatia and Poland, respectively, Kuzmic illuminates the relationship between the literature of dominant nations and that of the semicolonized territories that posed a threat to them. Ultimately, Kuzmic’s study enhances our understanding of not only these five novels but nineteenth-century European literature more generally.
Download or read book State of Virginity written by Ulrike Strasser and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important contribution to the historical study of sexuality and the growing feminist literature on the state
Download or read book The Void of Ethics written by Patrizia McBride and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a pluralistic society without absolute standards of judgment, how can an individual live a moral life? This is the question Robert Musil (1880-1942), an Austrian-born engineer and mathematician turned writer, asked in essays, plays, and fiction that grapple with the moral ambivalence of modern life. Though unfinished, his monumental novel of Vienna in the febrile days before World War I, The Man without Qualities, is identified by German scholars as the most important literary work of the twentieth century. In a fresh examination of his essays, notebooks, and fiction, Patrizia McBride reconstructs Musil's understanding of ethics as a realm of experience that eludes language and thought. After situating Musil's work within its contemporary cultural-philosophical horizon, as well as the historical background of rising National Socialism, McBride shows how the writer's notion of ethics as a void can be understood as a coherent and innovative response to the crises haunting Europe after World War I. She explores how Musil rejected the outdated, rationalistic morality of humanism, while simultaneously critiquing the irrationalism of contemporary art movements, including symbolism, impressionism, and expressionism. Her work reveals Musil's remarkable relevance today-particularly those aspects of his thought that made him unfashionable in his own time: a commitment to fighting ethical fundamentalism and a literary imagination that validates the pluralistic character of modern life.
Download or read book Bombay Modern written by Anjali Nerlekar and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-15 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anjali Nerlekar's Bombay Modern is a close reading of Arun Kolatkar's canonical poetic works that relocates the genre of poetry to the center of both Indian literary modernist studies and postcolonial Indian studies. Nerlekar shows how a bilingual, materialist reading of Kolatkar's texts uncovers a uniquely resistant sense of the "local" that defies the monolinguistic cultural pressures of the post-1960 years and straddles the boundaries of English and Marathi writing. Bombay Modern uncovers an alternative and provincial modernism through poetry, a genre that is marginal to postcolonial studies, and through bilingual scholarship across English and Marathi texts, a methodology that is currently peripheral at best to both modernist studies and postcolonial literary criticism in India. Eschewing any attempt to define an overarching or universal modernism, Bombay Modern delimits its sphere of study to "Bombay" and to the "post-1960" (the sathottari period) in an attempt to examine at close range the specific way in which this poetry redeployed the regional, the national, and the international to create a very tangible yet transient local.
Download or read book The Goddess written by David Leeming and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.
Download or read book Mourning Sickness written by Rebecca Comay and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the intellectual upheaval in German thought inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and brought to a climax by German Idealism. He believed, as did many others, that a political revolution would be unnecessary in Germany, because this intellectual "revolution" would preempt it. Mourning Sickness provides a new reading of these ideas in the light of contemporary theories of historical trauma. It explores the ways in which major historical events are experienced vicariously and the fantasies we use to make sense of them. Rebecca Comay brings Hegel into relation with the most burning contemporary discussions around catastrophe, revolution, and the role of media in shaping our political experience. The book will be of interest to readers of philosophy, literature, cultural studies, history, political theory, and memory studies.
Download or read book The Painted Drum written by Louise Erdrich and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Haunted and haunting. . . . With fearlessness and humility, in a narrative that flows more artfully than ever between destruction and rebirth, Erdrich has opened herself to possibilities beyond what we merely see—to the dead alive and busy, to the breath of trees and the souls of wolves—and inspires readers to open their hearts to these mysteries as well.”— Washington Post Book World From the author of the National Book Award Winner The Round House, Louise Erdrich's breathtaking, lyrical novel of a priceless Ojibwe artifact and the effect it has had on those who have come into contact with it over the years. While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined. Compelling and unforgettable, Louise Erdrich's Painted Drum explores the often-fraught relationship between mothers and daughters, the strength of family, and the intricate rhythms of grief with all the grace, wit, and startling beauty that characterizes this acclaimed author's finest work.
Download or read book Haunted Bauhaus written by Elizabeth Otto and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.
Download or read book In What Style Should We Build written by Heinrich Hubsch and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1996-07-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hubsch's argument that the technical progress and changed living habits of the nineteenth century rendered neoclassical principles antiquated is presented here along with responses to his essay by architects, historians, and critics over two decades.
Download or read book Franz Kafka in Context written by Carolin Duttlinger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accessible essays place Kafka in historical, political and cultural context, providing new and often unexpected perspectives on his works.
Download or read book Women Writing War written by Katharina von Hammerstein and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To expand scholarship on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple theaters of war, and on the many voices who contributed to, were affected by, and/or critiqued German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an interdisciplinary investigation, this volume explores select female-authored, German-language texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of World War I, or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to think about the intersection of nationalism, violence and gender and about the historical continuities and disruptions that shape such events.
Download or read book Nazi Film Melodrama written by Laura Heins and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural productions in the Third Reich often served explicit propaganda functions of legitimating racism and glorifying war and militarism. Likewise, the proliferation of domestic and romance films in Nazi Germany also represented an ideological stance. Rather than reinforcing traditional gender role divisions and the status quo of the nuclear family, these films were much more permissive about desire and sexuality than previously assumed. Focusing on German romance films, domestic melodramas, and home front films from 1933 to 1945, Nazi Film Melodrama shows how melodramatic elements in Nazi cinema functioned as part of a project to move affect, body, and desire beyond the confines of bourgeois culture and participate in a curious modernization of sexuality engineered to advance the imperialist goals of the Third Reich. Offering a comparative analysis of Nazi productions with classical Hollywood films of the same era, Laura Heins argues that German fascist melodramas differed from their American counterparts in their negative views of domesticity and in their use of a more explicit antibourgeois rhetoric. Nazi melodramas, film writing, and popular media appealed to viewers by promoting liberation from conventional sexual morality and familial structures, presenting the Nazi state and the individual as dynamic and revolutionary. Some spectators objected to the eroticization and modernization of the public sphere under Nazism, however, pitting Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda against more conservative film audiences in a war over the very status of domesticity and the shape of the family. Drawing on extensive archival research, this perceptive study highlights the seemingly contradictory aspects of gender representation and sexual morality in Nazi-era cinema.
Download or read book Hitler s Heroines written by Antje Ascheid and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brightest stars in fascist films.
Download or read book Le Deuxi me Sexe written by Simone de Beauvoir and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1989 with total page 791 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.
Download or read book Figures of the World written by Christopher Laing Hill and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill follows naturalism’s emergence in France and circulation around the world from North and South America to East Asia. His analysis shows that transnational literary studies must operate on multiple scales, combine distant reading with close analysis, and investigate how literary forms develop on the move. The book begins by tracing the history of naturalist fiction from the 1860s into the twentieth century and the reasons it spread around the world. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and the United States. Rather than genealogies of European influence or the domination of cultural “peripheries” by the center, novels by Émile Zola, Tayama Katai, Frank Norris, and other writers reveal conspicuous departures from metropolitan models as writers revised naturalist methods to address new social conditions. Hill offers a new approach to studying culture on a large scale for readers interested in literature, the arts, and the history of ideas.
