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Anke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur drifted through city streets, inspired and repelled by the surrounding scenes of splendor and squalor. Gleber examines this often elusive figure in the particular contexts of Weimar Germany and the intellectual sphere of Walter Benjamin, with whom the concept of flanerie is often associated. She sketches the European influences that produced the German flaneur and establishes the figure as a pervasive presence in Weimar culture, as well as a profound influence on modern perceptions of public space....
Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis focuses attention to how the residents of smaller cities, provincial districts, rural settings, and colonial outposts have produced, disseminated, and read print materials.
During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weim...
This book concentrates on three novels set in the rapidly changing white-collar milieu of Berlin during the Weimar Republic. All three novels are concerned with the disarray, anguish and tension of commercial "Angestellten" - figures who are involved in selling, advertising, and other growing consumer-orientated industries. Focusing on the socially critical import of the narrative and characterization, it is argued that much of the everyday experiences of the protagonists is shaped by commercial influences which penetrate their jobs, their places of entertainment and their private and public relationships in very subtle, but nonetheless powerful and often damaging ways. The study not only emphasizes connections and parallels between the novels which have frequently been overlooked. By examining contemporary developments in the Berlin entertainment world, the commercialist ethos and the architecture of "Neue Sachlichkeit," it also sets them in several interrelated contexts yielding new perspectives on the relationship between the novels and the society and culture of Weimar Berlin.
Despite extraordinary attention within the past five years by novelists, playwrights, and critics, the subject of mothers and daughters, and motherhood and daughterhood, has remained complicated and compelling. Mother Puzzles is a unique collection that examines how women who write have dealt with those relationships. Pearlman notes in her introduction that missing mothers--mothers who are physically present but emotionally absent--are often found in works by women. The question this collection addresses is why the mother, as currently portrayed in American literature by women, has moved from sainted marginality (as icon), to vicious caricature (as destroyer), to the puzzling figure that eme...
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The condition of exile, a wide-ranging phenomenon of the twentieth century, has been of considerable interest to writers and scholars alike. Focusing on the novels Izol'da by Irina Odoevtseva, Mys bur' by Nina Berberova, Kind aller Länder by Irmgard Keun, and Heimatsuchen by Ilse Tielsch, this book is the first in its field to examine the literary representation of the adolescent girl in exile. It explores the interplay of themes and images relating to adolescence, femaleness, and exile through a close reading of each individual text as well as from a comparative perspective. This book highlights the work of four women writers who have only recently begun to gain scholarly recognition. Additionally, it situates both the works and their authors in their historical context and in the context of Slavic or Germanic scholarship.