'Relations Stop Nowhere' by Hugh Ridley

'Relations Stop Nowhere' by Hugh Ridley

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.

Hugh Ridley was professor of German at University College Dublin for twenty-six years, and visiting professor at the University of Essen. His books include studies of major German authors – Thomas Mann (1987, 1995), Rilke (with Herbert Herzmann 1992) and Gottfried Benn (1990) – together with work encompassing broad sweeps through European and German culture: Industrie und deutsche Literatur (with Keith Bullivant, 1975) and Images of Imperial Rule (1983). His numerous essays include work on the Vormärz, Nietzsche, Weimar Republic, Walter Benjamin and the GDR, on system theory and the techniques and ideology of literary history.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9789042021839
ISBN 10	9042021837
Title	'Relations Stop Nowhere'
Author	Hugh Ridley
Series	Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Brill
Year published	2007-01-01
Number of pages	317
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.