Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives examines the continuing relevance of Büchner in the early twenty-first century in terms of politics, science, philosophy, aesthetics, cultural studies and performance studies. It situates Büchner’s interdisciplinary work in relation to the philosophical, scientific and religious discourses of his time, while also investigating the ways in which Büchner’s intersectional writings anticipated – sometimes uncannily – questions and problems which were to become central concerns in modernism and after. The nineteen essays in the book, some in English and some in German, uniquely combine close readings of individual passages and images with wide-ranging intertextual comparisons, linking Büchner to more than twenty-five writers, thinkers and theoreticians from his time and ours. Der Band Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives beschäftigt sich mit Büchners anhaltender Aktualität in den Bereichen Politik, Naturwissenschaft, Philosophie, Ästhetik, Kulturwissenschaft und Theater. Er setzt Büchners interdisziplinäres Werk in Beziehung zu den philosophischen, naturwissenschaftlichen und religiösen Themen seiner Zeit, untersucht aber auch wie sein Schreiben auf manchmal verblüffende Weise Fragen und Probleme vorwegnimmt, die für die Moderne und die Nachmoderne bis zum heutigen Tag zentral werden sollten. Die neunzehn, teils auf Englisch, teils auf Deutsch verfassten Beiträge zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie eingehende Einzelinterpretationen bestimmter Werkstellen mit weitreichenden intertextuellen Bezügen zu mehr als 25 SchriftstellerInnen, KünstlerInnen, DenkerInnen, und TheoretikerInnen verbinden.

This collection of Büchner's three theatrical works includes Danton's Death, his great play about the French Revolution, Leonce and Lena, his "black" romantic comedy and Woyzeck, the unfinished work on which Alban Berg based his famous opera. All three works remained virtually unknown for half a century but today have found an important place in the modern repertory.

The writer, scientist, philosopher, and radical democrat Georg Büchner (1813-1837) occupies a unique place in the cultural legacy of the German-speaking countries. Born into an epoch of inevitable, yet arrested historical transition, Büchner produced a small but exceptionally rich body of work. This collection of essays in English and in German considers the full spectrum of his writings, the political pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote, the dramas Danton’s Tod, Leonce und Lena, Woyzeck, and the fragmentary narrative Lenz, as well as the letters, the philosophical lectures on Descartes and Spinoza, and the scientific texts. The essays examine connections between these works, study texts in detail, debate ways of editing them, and trace their reception in contemporary literature and film. The novel readings presented here not only celebrate Büchner on the eve of his bicentenary birthday but also insert this untimely figure into discussions of the revolution-restoration dynamic and realism in poetics and politics.

This is your rhetoric translated. These wretches, these executioners, the guillotine are your speeches come to life. You have built your doctrines out of human heads... Why should an event that transforms the whole of humanity not advance through blood? 1794: the French Revolution reaches its climax. After a series of bloody purges the life-loving, volatile Danton is tormented by his part in the killing. His political rival, the driven, ascetic Robespierre, decides Danton's fate. A titanic struggle begins. Once friends who wanted to change the world, now one stands for compromise the other for ideological purity as the guillotine awaits. A revolutionary himself, George Büchner was 21 when he wrote the play in 1835, while hiding from the police. With its hair-raising on-rush of scenes and vivid dramatisation of complex, visionary characters, Danton's Death has a claim to be the greatest political tragedy ever written. In his newly-revised translation, Howard Brenton captures Büchner's exhilarating energy as Danton struggles to avoid his inexorable fall.

This is the first extensive survey and analysis of the criticism of Woyzeck from the nineteenth century to the present."--BOOK JACKET.

All Theater Is Revolutionary Theater is the first book to consider why, in the Western tradition (and only in the Western tradition), theatrical drama is regarded as its own literary or poetic type, when the criteria needed to differentiate drama from other forms of writing do not resemble the criteria by which types of prose or verse are ordinarily distinguished. Through close readings of such playwrights as Beckett, Brecht, Büchner, Eliot, Shaw, Wedekind, and Robert Wilson, Benjamin Bennett looks at the relationship between literature and drama, identifying typical problems in the development of dramatic literature and exploring how the uncomfortable association with theatrical performance affects the operation of drama in literary history.Bennett's historical investigations into theoretical works ranging from Aristotle to Artaud, Brecht, and Diderot suggest that the attempt to include drama in the system of Western literature causes certain specific incongruities that, in his view, have the salutary effect of preserving the otherwise endangered possibility of a truly liberal, progressive, or revolutionary literature.