Based on the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 2002.

There is a large pool of German novelists in whose oeuvre we may look for works of landmark significance, and at certain periods of its history German fiction is particularly rich. Yet although the novel begins to assert itself in the seventeenth century, we have to wait until the late eighteenth, and Goethe's first major prose work, Werther, to see it truly rise to the level of other genres. The thirteen novels featured in this collection have all proved milestones in the development of the form, and there is heavy prominence given to works by Goethe himself and by Thomas Mann. Through these, as well as those by such figures as Kafka, Hesse, and Günter Grass, we can trace the development of the novel to its far more 'self-conscious' form, ranging through the social studies of the nineteenth to works which treat a variety of intellectual, psychological and philosophical issues in the twentieth. A second volume will cover landmarks published between 1959 and the present day. These essays, all by specialists in the relevant field, were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge.

Moving book history in a new direction, this study examines publishers as brokers of Central Europe's political public sphere. They created international print markets, translated new texts, launched new journals, supported outspoken authors, and experimented with popular formats. Most of all, they contested censorship with finesse and resolve, thereby undermining the aim of Prussia and Austria to criminalize democratic thought. By packaging dissent through popular media, publishers cultivated broad readerships, promoted political literacy, and refashioned citizenship ideals. As political actors, intellectual midwives, and cultural mediators, publishers speak to a broad range of scholarly interests. Their outsize personalities, their entrepreneurial zeal, and their publishing achievements portray how print markets shaped the political world. The narrow perimeters of political communication in the late-absolutist states of Prussia and Austria curtailed the open market of ideas. The publishing industry contested this information order, working both within and outside legal parameters to create a modern public sphere. Their expansion of print markets, their cat-and-mouse game with censors, and their ingenuity in packaging political commentary sheds light on the production and reception of dissent. Against the backdrop of censorship and police surveillance, the successes and failures of these citizens of print tell us much about nineteenth-century civil society and Central Europe's tortuous pathway to political modernization. Cutting across a range of disciplines, this study will engage social and political historians as well as scholars of publishing, literary criticism, cultural studies, translation, and the public sphere. The history of Central Europe's print markets between Napoleon and the era of unification doubles as a political tale. It sheds important new light on political communication and how publishers exposed German-language readers to the Age of Democratic Revolution.

Stefan Heym's very beginnings as a writer were a direct response to the threat of Fascism and the mass veneration of Hitler, and in his American exile he was to encounter the marketing and image machinery of capitalism and democratic politics. After arriving in the GDR in the wake of McCarthyism he was then confronted with the Stalin cult and the stark contradiction between the personality cult and the purported aims of the Communist vision. This book examines Heym's response to a problem that did not die out with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and which he treated as a universal phenomenon, and probes the extent to which he employed various publicity techniques to shape his own reception as a writer. In this analysis of an often controversial figure, the author draws on much uncovered archive material, and places close readings in a broad context; this is one of few studies that deal with Heym's career as a whole, from his beginnings in the Weimar Republic and Czechoslovakia and his overnight success in America through to his eminence as an intellectual public figure in the GDR and the reunified Germany.

The emancipation of Jews that commenced in Germany in the early 19th century pushed many Jews into urban commerce, industries, and intellectual professions. The ongoing modernization and the Jewish prominence in business brought about an anti-Jewish reaction. Jews were seen as the incarnation of the new materialistic "Zeitgeist", dishonest merchants pursuing non-German business practices, and usurpers of economic power. The Jews represented an alien, unwanted economic system. The backlash against the Jewish businessman was reflected in contemporary literature, from Wilhelm Hauff's "Jud Süß" (1827) to the Nazi novel "Shylock unter Bauern" by Felix Nabor (1934). Examines the representation of the Jewish businessman in German literature, in both antisemitic works and apologetic ones. Two "schools of thought" can be discerned in these writings: that the Jews, including the businessmen, can be corrected and assimilated into the German nation (e.g. in Freytag's "Soll und Haben", 1855); and the racist and eliminationist conception of the Jews as unassimilable and inherently detrimental aliens who have to be removed from the body of the nation (as in Wilhelm von Polenz's "Der Büttnerbauer", 1895), with Heinrich Mann's anti-Jewish writings somewhere in between. Discusses also the ambivalent stance of Theodor Fontane. Dwells on two "cautionary tales" written by Jewish authors and addressed to the Jews: the novel "Jud Süß" by Feuchtwanger (1925) and the play "Jud Süß" by Paul Kornfeld (1929), as well as responses to antisemitism addressed to a general audience: "Der neue Ahasver" by Fritz Mauthner (1881), "René Richter" by Lothar Brieger-Wasservogel (1906), and Hermann Bahr's "Die Rotte Korahs" (1919), a philosemitic non-Jewish response.

Writing Time shows how serial literature based in journals and anthologies shaped the awareness of time at a transformative moment in the European literary and political landscapes. Sean Franzel explores how German-speaking authors and editors "write time" both by writing about time and by mapping time itself through specific literary formats. Through case studies of such writers as F. J. Bertuch, K. A. Böttinger, J. W. Goethe, Ludwig Börne, and Heinrich Heine, Franzel analyzes how serial writing predicated on open-ended continuation becomes a privileged mode of social commentary and literary entertainment and provides readers with an ongoing "history" of the present, or Zeitgeschichte. Drawing from media theory and periodical studies as well as from Reinhart Koselleck's work on processes of temporalization and "untimely" models of historical time, Writing Time presents "smaller" literary forms—the urban tableau, cultural reportage, and caricature—as new ways of imagining temporal unfolding, recentering periodicals and other serial forms at the heart of nineteenth-century print culture.