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Full Description
This book attempts for the first time a comparative literary history of Germany and the USA in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its material does not come from the familiar overlaps of individual German and American writers, but from the work of the literary historians of the two countries after 1815, when American intellectuals took Germany as a model for their project to create an American national literature. The first part of the book examines fundamental structural affinities between the two literary histories and the common problems these caused, especially in questions of canon, realism, aesthetics and in the marginalization of popular and women's writing. In the second part, significant figures whose work straddle the two literatures - from Sealsfield and Melville, Whitman and Thomas Mann to Nietzsche, Emerson and Bellow - are discussed in detail, and the arguments of the first part are shown in their relevance to understanding major writers. This book is not merely comparative in scope: it shows that only international comparison can explain the course of American literary history in the nineteenth and twentieth century. As recent developments in American Studies explore the multi-cultural and 'hybrid' nature of the American tradition, this book offers evidence of the dependencies which linked American and German national literary history.
Contents
Preface
Part One: German and American Literary History
Chapter 1: Introduction to National Literatures
Chapter 2: The Early Years of German and American Literary History
Chapter 3: Literary History and Democratic Nation Building
Chapter 4: Democracy and Realism
Chapter 5: Hunting for American Aesthetics
Chapter 6: Exclusions from the Canon
Chapter 7: Literary History and Anthropology
Part Two: The Mid-Atlantic Space
Chapter 8: The American Heart of Darkness: Charles Sealsfield and the West
Chapter 9: American Idylls beyond Buffalo Bill
Chapter 10: Emerson in the German and American Traditions
Bibliography
Index
