The Virginal Mother in German Culture - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Virginal Mother in German Culture write by Lauren Nossett. This book was released on 2019-03-15. The Virginal Mother in German Culture available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
The Virginal Mother in German Literature
The Virginal Mother in German Literature - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Virginal Mother in German Literature write by Lauren Nossett. This book was released on 2016. The Virginal Mother in German Literature available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Eardrums
Eardrums - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Eardrums write by Tyler Whitney. This book was released on 2019-06-15. Eardrums available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In this innovative study, Tyler Whitney demonstrates how a transformation and militarization of the civilian soundscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left indelible traces on the literature that defined the period. Both formally and thematically, the modernist aesthetics of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Detlev von Liliencron, and Peter Altenberg drew on this blurring of martial and civilian soundscapes in traumatic and performative repetitions of war. At the same time, Richard Huelsenbeck assaulted audiences in Zurich with his “sound poems,” which combined references to World War I, colonialism, and violent encounters in urban spaces with nonsensical utterances and linguistic detritus—all accompanied by the relentless beating of a drum on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire. Eardrums is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between acoustical modernity and German modernism, charting a literary and cultural history written in and around the eardrum. The result is not only a new way of understanding the sonic impulses behind key literary texts from the period. It also outlines an entirely new approach to the study of literature as as the interaction of text and sonic practice, voice and noise, which will be of interest to scholars across literary studies, media theory, sound studies, and the history of science.
The Void of Ethics
The Void of Ethics - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Void of Ethics write by Patrizia McBride. This book was released on 2006. The Void of Ethics available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
Adulterous Nations
Adulterous Nations - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Adulterous Nations write by Tatiana Kuzmic. This book was released on 2016-11-15. Adulterous Nations available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
