Although German Americans number almost 43 million and are the largest ethnic group in the United States, scholars of American literature have paid little attention to this influential and ethnically diverse cultural group. In a work of unparalleled depth and range, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz explores the cultural and historical background of the varied images of Germany and Germans throughout the past two centuries. Using an interdisciplinary approach known as comparative imagology, which borrows from social psychology and cultural anthropology, Zacharasiewicz samples a broad spectrum of original sources, including literary works, letters, diaries, autobiographical accounts, travelogues, newspaper reports, films, and even cartoons and political caricatures. Starting with the notion of Germany as the ideal site for academic study and travel in the nineteenth century and concluding with the twentieth-century image of Germany as an aggressive country, this innovative work examines the ever-changing image of Germans and Germany in the writings of Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Clemens, Henry James, William James, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Dewey, H. L. Mencken, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Thomas Wolfe, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William Styron, Walker Percy, and John Hawkes, among others.

Examination Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Paderborn, 67 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: During the last two centuries the American perception of Germany has periodically shifted as both countries have been rivals, friends, opponents and most recently allies. This has also been mirrored in the periodically changing American picture of Germany and the Germans, which over the years generated an abundance of stereotypes. While on the one hand, positive images have emerged such as the 'naturally virtuous and scholarly German, ' there have been, on the other hand, numerous negative generalizations, for example, the 'hard drinking and violent Teuton.' These notions were often formed through hearsay, personal experiences and encounters with Germans at home and abroad, through literature and political-social relations between the United States and Germany. They are often persistently maintained, have resisted any revision and are frequently regarded as the standard of thought. The role of American literature in creating, sustaining and perpetuating images continues to be of particular importance and this needs to be examined if one wishes to understand how a wide range of long-lasting German stereotypes came into existence. The images of Germany and the Germans which are projected in the works of numerous American writers, including Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Erica Jong and Walter Abish, have become core images found in travelogues, novels, poetry and short fiction. This thesis surveys the images of Germany and the Germans in American literature from the late 19th to the end of the 20th century, and proceeds to focus on two selected works: Walter Abish's How German is It (1980) and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973). Abish's novel is a natural choice for an endeavor of this nature as it is both an extensive and intensive explorat

Examination Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Paderborn, language: English, abstract: During the last two centuries the American perception of Germany has periodically shifted as both countries have been rivals, friends, opponents and most recently allies. This has also been mirrored in the periodically changing American picture of Germany and the Germans, which over the years generated an abundance of stereotypes. While on the one hand, positive images have emerged such as the ‘naturally virtuous and scholarly German,’ there have been, on the other hand, numerous negative generalizations, for example, the ‘hard drinking and violent Teuton.’ These notions were often formed through hearsay, personal experiences and encounters with Germans at home and abroad, through literature and political-social relations between the United States and Germany. They are often persistently maintained, have resisted any revision and are frequently regarded as the standard of thought. The role of American literature in creating, sustaining and perpetuating images continues to be of particular importance and this needs to be examined if one wishes to understand how a wide range of long-lasting German stereotypes came into existence. The images of Germany and the Germans which are projected in the works of numerous American writers, including Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, Erica Jong and Walter Abish, have become core images found in travelogues, novels, poetry and short fiction. This thesis surveys the images of Germany and the Germans in American literature from the late 19th to the end of the 20th century, and proceeds to focus on two selected works: Walter Abish’s How German is It (1980) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). Abish’s novel is a natural choice for an endeavor of this nature as it is both an extensive and intensive exploration of images attributed to German identity. Jong’s novel, on the other hand, is an exploration of individual identity in a German setting and has been selected because of its enormous role in the relatively new field of women’s studies.

Examines the image of the US in German poetry and the reception and influence of American poetry in Germany since 1945. This book focuses on the image of the US in German poetry and the reception of American poetry in Germany since 1945. Gregory Divers examines poems by major figures in 20th-century German literature - Benn, Brecht, Bachmann, Jandl, and Grass, among others - and by other poets who shaped America's postwar image in Germany. Divers traces America's postwar status in Germany from the prisoner-of-war poems of Günter Eich to the pop poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Peter Handke. Continuing, he finds that although the 1960s protest poems of Erich Fried and others reflect the tarnishing of America's image due to Vietnam, 1970s travel poems by Brinkmann, Kunert, and Kunze confirm the resiliency of that image. Finally, Divers looks at poems by Hartung, Delius, and Kling to illustrate the new heights reached by America's image within German literary circles during the 1980s, and the status of America in Germany after reunification. In charting these developments in postwar German poetry, Divers also shows how American influences are crucial to its understanding, not only surveying postwar German reception of Whitman, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, but also examining the influence of such figures as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Gregory Divers is Assistant Professor of German at Saint Louis University.

Although fictional—and often fantastic—representations of nature have been a distinguishing feature of Latin American literature for centuries, ecocriticism, understood as the study of literature as it relates to depictions of the natural world, environmental issues, and the ways in which human beings interact and identify with their natural surroundings, did not emerge as a field of scholarly interest in the region until the end of the twentieth century. This volume employs an ecocritical lens in order to explore and question the use of the river imagery in Latino and Latin American literature from the colonial period to our modern world, creating a space in which to examine both its literal and figurative meanings, associated as much with processes of a personal nature as with those of the collective experience in the region. The slow, meandering streams of nostalgia, the raging currents of conflict or the stagnant waters of social decay are just a few of the ways in which the river has become an important symbol and inspiration to many of the region’s writers. This book offers a diverse collection of writings that, through a trans-historical and trans-geographical perspective, allows us, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, to reflect on the rich and dynamic image of the river and, by extension, on the vital context of Latin/o America, its people and societies.

Of all European cities, Americans today are perhaps most curious about Berlin, whose position in the American imagination is an essential component of nineteenth-century, postwar and contemporary transatlantic imagology. Over various periods, Berlin has been a tenuous space for American claims to cultural heritage and to real geographic space in Europe, symbolizing the ultimate evil and the power of redemption. This volume offers a comprehensive examination of the city’s image in American literature from 1840 to the present. Tracing both a history of Berlin and of American culture through the ways the city has been narrated across three centuries by some 100 authors through 145 novels, short stories, plays and poems, Tales of Berlin presents a composite landscape not only of the German capital, but of shifting subtexts in American society which have contextualized its meaning for Americans in the past, and continue to do so today.