In this study Leena Eilittä analyses Bachmann's work via two key concepts - 'utopia' and 'disillusionment' - which allow her to locate Bachmann's thinking in the post war critical discourse in Germany. Already in her early works Bachmann turns to the idea of utopianism as a possibility to cope with the problems of past heritage and with those of contemporary society. It is this utopian perscpective that allows her to address the position of a woman in critical terms and to make reflections about a more equal society in the major body of her writings. -- Publisher.

Afterlives of Romantic Intermediality addresses the manifold, even global artistic developments that were initiated by European Romantics. In the first section, the contributors show how the rising perspective of intermediality was discussed in philosophical terms and adapted itself to Romantic literature and music. In the second section, the contributors show how post-Romantic writers, visual artists, and composers have engaged with Romantic heritage. By exploring primary works that range from European arts to Latin American literature, these essays focus on the interdisciplinary developments that have emerged in literature, music, painting, film, architecture, and video art. Overall, the contributions in this volume demonstrate that intermedial connections—or sometimes the conscious lack of such connections—embody intriguing aspects of modernity and postmodernity.

The essays in this collection, which were written by European and North American specialists, position intermediality as a praxis of interpretative analysis in order to show how intermediality challenges our notion of art. The writers examine the various intermedial relations between the arts, which may take the form of reference to another form of art, a combination of two or more forms of art or a generic transformation from one form of art to another. In such cases, an intermedial approach helps us to grasp the changing relationship between the arts, which affects our reception of experience. Intermediality has profoundly changed our understanding of interdisciplinary relations, formerly examined in the field of interart studies. By introducing a medial aspect, intermediality has succeeded in making a “leap” from past practices of artistic interrelatedness to our contemporary medial age, in which literature along with other arts may be understood as a medium. This ambitious undertaking has contributed to the liberation of literature and other arts from an isolated position in the established scholarly landscape with its clear-cut borderlines between disciplines. The essays in this collection are a valuable contribution to this on-going discussion about the relationships between the arts. The variety of essays published in this collection makes it an excellent introduction to academics and university students in such disciplines as literature, music, theatre, art history and media studies. Due to its clarity – which does not sacrifice philosophical depth concerning the role of intermedial studies for several forms of art – this book will also be of interest to academics and students who are currently working at advanced level art schools.

The mythological patrimony is an excellent example of the unconscious creative ability that brings reason both to the existence of myth as well as to its symbolic function. Reconsidering the connection between literature and psychoanalysis, this study starts from the Jungian archetypal theory up to the Freudian unconscious and its ability to produce symbols, and provides the tools for a reading of the phenomenon of the literary reworking, in the modern age, of meaningful themes and mythological figures. Therefore, revising and rewriting the myth means thinking again about one’s cultural memory, attempting to re-propose in a new dimension the ever present questions that have not found an answer and which the figures of the myth symbolise across the time. The attention focuses on figures like the elementary spirits of Romantic imagery, in particular on that of the Wasserfrau, up to the analysis of a twentieth-century reinterpretation of the myth of Undine. Moreover the Medea myth is reconsidered starting from the contradiction implicit in this figure – and in that of every Mother Goddess – in order to then explore the most problematic and conflicting aspect of this image of womanhood, the infanticide, which over time becomes the symbol of the denial of the maternal principle.