Contemporary German Writers, Their Aesthetics and Their Language

Product Description

The aesthetic and linguistic concerns of German-language writers are explored against the backdrop of a readership in transition. Two essays examine intertextuality as a concept and as a phenomenon in the work of Christa Wolf, before the first main set (aesthetics) addresses narrative techniques (Jurek Becker, Wolfgang Hilbig, Hans Joachim Schädlich), formal experimentation (Ror Wolf, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Hanns-Josef Ortheil), allegory (Christoph Ransmayr), metaphor (Eveline Hasler), feminine aesthetics (Brigitte Kronauer, Anne Duden), and links between literature and photography (Rolf Dieter Brinkmann). The second main group presents a series of analyses of language as problem and practice: Sprachlosigkeit (Ilse Aichinger, Robert Schneider), logocentricity and etymology (Heinrich Böll, Elisabeth Reichart), and authenticity and cliché (Werner Schwab, Rainald Goetz), Ralf Schnell's concluding essay is an assessment of a situation which allows writers more freedom as the shackles of the past are cast off.

About the Author

The Editors: Arthur Williams is Senior Lecturer in German Studies and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Bradford. He publishes on contemporary German society and literature.
Stuart Parkes is Reader in German at the University of Sunderland. He has numerous publications on modern German literature and society.
Julian Preece is Lecturer in German at the University of Huddersfield. He has published widely on twentieth-century German and Austrian themes. Williams and Parkes are co-editors of The Individual, Identity and Innovation: Signals from Contemporary Literature and the New Germany (1994), and (with Roland Smith) of Literature on the Threshold: The German Novel in the 1980's (1990) and German Literature at the Time of Change, 1989-1990: German Unity and German Identity in Literary Perspective (1991).