Alexandra Johnson traces the diary's quirky and compelling history through centuries of writing for and about one's self. Where the earliest of pilgrims and explorers kept journals of their findings, scientists including Darwin used them to develop their theories. --Book Jacket.

At the beginning of June 1895, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the Paris correspondent of the Austrian Neue Freie Presse, made a momentous decision - he would bring about the creation of a state for the Jews. In his attempt to realise this dream, he became the greatest figure of modern Jewish history and is today seen as the father of the State of Israel.

The Aesthetics of Kinship intervenes critically into rigidified discourses about the emergence of the nuclear family and the corresponding interior subject in the eighteenth century. By focusing on kinship constellations instead of “family plots” in seminal literary works of the period, this book presents an alternative view of the eighteenth-century literary social world and its concomitant ideologies. Whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy and political theory posit the nuclear family as a microcosm for the ideal modern nation-state, literature of the period offers a far more heterogeneous image of kinship structures, one that includes members of various classes and is not defined by blood. Through a radical re-reading of the multifarious kinship structures represented in literature of the long eighteenth century, The Aesthetics of Kinship questions the inevitability of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and invokes alternative futures for conceptions of social and political life.

She also examines the changing significance of skin through brilliant analyses of art, philosophy, and anatomical drawings and writings, as well as Germanic, American, and African American literature. Benthien discusses the semantic and psychic aspects of touching, feeling, and intellectual perception; the motifs of perforated, armored, or transparent skin; and much more through close readings of such authors as Kleist, Buchner, Hawthorne, Balzac, Rilke, Kafka, Plath, Morrison, Wideman, and Ondaatje.

This work provides an introduction to the visual arts in Germany from the early years of German unification to World War II. The study is an analysis of painting, sculpture, graphic art, design, film and photography in relation to a wider set of cultural and social issues that were specific to German modernism. It concentrates on the ways in which the production and reception of art interacted with and was affected by responses to unification, conflict between left and right political factions, gender concerns, contemporary philosophical and religious ideas, the growth of cities, and the increasing important of mass culture.

Accounts of travel to England reached unprecedented levels of popularity in the German states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Competition therefore increased for travel writers to produce travelogues which offered the most authentic, original and vibrant picture of England. The wider range of narrative strategies which travellers consequently deployed increasingly drew on the emotional responses of their audience whether to serve a political purpose, show concern for the darker side to the Industrial Revolution or simply demonstrate the humanitarian interests of the travellers themselves. In this broad-ranging study, Alison E. Martin draws on a variety of travellers, men and women, canonical and forgotten, to chart the fascinating variety of styles and approaches which mark this highly interdisciplinary genre.

"Literature and Weather. Shakespeare – Goethe – Zola" is dedicated to the relation between literature and weather, i.e. a cultural practice and an everyday phenomenon that has played very different epistemic roles in the history of the world. The study undertakes an archaeology of literature’s affinity to the weather which tells the story of literature’s weathery self-reflection and its creative reinventions as a medium in different epistemic and social circumstances. The book undertakes extensive close readings of three exemplary literary texts: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther and Zola’s The Rougon-Macquarts. These readings provide the basis for reconstructing three distinct formations, negotiating the relationship between literature and weather in the 17th, the 18th and the 19th centuries. The study is a pioneering contribution to the recent debates of literature’s indebtedness to the environment. It initiates a rewriting of literary history that is weather-sensitive; the question of literature’s agency, its power to affect, cannot be raised without understanding the way the weather works in a certain cultural formation.