This 1961 book presents a full-length study of the later works of Heine, relating to Heine's life the underlying themes in his poetry.

This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s. While mock-heroic poetry is a parodistic counterpart to serious epic, mock-epic poetry starts by parodying epic but moves on to much wider and richer literary explorations; it relies heavily on intertextual allusion to other works, on narratorial irony, on the sympathetic and sometimes libertine presentation of sexual relatons, and on a range of satirical devices. It includes well-known texts (Pope's Dunciad, Byron's Don Juan, Heine's Atta Troll) and others which are little known (Ratschky's Melchior Striregel, Parny's La Guerre des Dieux). It owes a marked debt to Italian romance epic (especially Ariosto). The study places these texts in the literary context of the decline of serious epic, which helped mock epic to flourish, and of the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' which questioned the authority of Homer's and Virgil's epics; and it relates their substance to contemporary debates about questions of religion and gender.

Heinrich Heine's role in the formation of Critical Theory has been systematically overlooked in the course of the successful appropriation of his thought by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the legacy they left, in particular for Adorno, Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. This book examines the critical connections that led Adorno to call for a “reappraisal” of Heine in a 1948 essay that, published posthumously, remains under-examined. Tracing Heine's Jewish difference and its liberating comedy of irreverence in the thought of the Frankfurt School, the book situates the project of Critical Theory in the tradition of a praxis of critique, which Heine elevates to the art of public controversy. Heine's bold linking of aesthetics and political concerns anticipates the critical paradigm assumed by Benjamin and Adorno. Reading Critical Theory with Heine recovers a forgotten voice that has theoretically critical significance for the formation of the Frankfurt School. With Heine, the project of Critical Theory can be understood as the sustained effort to advance the emancipation of the affects and the senses, at the heart of a theoretical vision that recognizes pleasure as the liberating force in the fight for freedom.

Georg Lukács was one of the most controversial Marxist philosophers of this century. In this book, however, he appears in another guise: as a literary historian in the tradition of Sainte-Beuve and Belinsky, offering an advanced introduction to one of the richest periods of European literature. These previously untranslated essays - on Heinrich von Kleist, Joseph Eichendorff, Georg Büchner, Heinrich Heine, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane - were written between 1936 and 1950. They illuminate Lukács's enduring love of German literature and his faith in the humanist tradition. In all of them, moreover, he can be seen actively intervening in the cultural debates of the time - on the role of literature, on the literary tradition in society, and on the relationship between literature and politics. Although his defense of realism against the crudities of socialist realism is implicit throughout these essays, Lukács's main purpose was to illuminate the intellectual, historical, and literary context in which these great writers worked, to attain a fuller understanding of what they wrote, and also to settle accounts with contemporary German critics who were attempting to create a fascist pantheon.

An exploration into the role of food in the aesthetic revolution of Romanticism

Essays offering new insights into important topics and figures in German literature, from the middle ages to the present day. The essays in this volume, contributed by well-known Germanists and those working in the field of comparative literature, take fresh looks at key figures and issues in German literary and cultural studies, from the medieval to thepost-modernist period.