Exposes German Romanticism’s entanglements of aesthetic philosophy with racialized models of humanity Late Enlightenment philosophers and writers like Herder, Goethe, and Schiller broke with conventions of form and genre to prioritize an idealized, and racially coded, universality. Newly translated literatures from colonial contexts served as the basis for their evaluations of how to contribute to a distinctly “German” national literary tradition, one that valorized modernity and freedom and thus fortified crucial determinants of modern concepts of whiteness. Through close readings of both canonical and less-studied Romantic texts, Stephanie Galasso examines the intimately entwined histories of racialized subjectivity and aesthetic theory and shows how literary genre is both symptomatic and generative of the cultural violence that underpinned the colonial project. Poetic expression and its generic conventions continue to exert pressure on the framing and reception of the stories that can be told about interpersonal and structural experiences of oppression. Genre, Race, and the Production of Subjectivity in German Romanticism explores how white subjectivity is guarded by symbolic and material forms of violence.

Irony's Antics marks a major intervention into the underexplored role of the comic in German letters. At the book's heart is the relationship between the comic and irony. Weitzman argues that in the early twentieth century, irony, a key figure for the German Romantics, reemerged from its relegation to "nonsense" in a way that both rethought Romantic irony and dramatically extended its reach.

As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

Matthew Miller’s The German Epic in the Cold War explores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post–World War II Germany. Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the second half of the twentieth century: Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), Johnson’s Jahrestage (Anniversaries), and Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings). In them, he traces the epic’s unlikely reemergence after the catastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and its continuity across the historical watershed of 1989–91, defined by German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Building on Franco Moretti’s codification of the literary form of the modern epic, Miller demonstrates the epic’s ability to understand the past; to come to terms with ethical, social, and political challenges in the second half of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe and beyond; and to debate and envision possible futures.

Chunjie Zhang's Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism examines German-language texts in the context of Europe's colonial expansion to reveal non-European influence on German thinking.

In this ambitious book, Kirk Wetters traces the genealogy of the demonic in German literature from its imbrications in Goethe to its varying legacies in the work of essential authors, both canonical and less well known, such as Gundolf, Spengler, Benjamin, Lukács, and Doderer. Wetters focuses especially on the philological and metaphorological resonances of the demonic from its core formations through its appropriations in the tumultuous twentieth century. Propelled by equal parts theoretical and historical acumen, Wetters explores the ways in which the question of the demonic has been employed to multiple theoretical, literary, and historico-political ends. He thereby produces an intellectual history that will be consequential both to scholars of German literature and to comparatists.

Kafka's Blues proves the startling thesis that many of Kafka's major works engage in a coherent, sustained meditation on racial transformation from white European into what Kafka refers to as the "Negro" (a term he used in English). Indeed, this book demonstrates that cultural assimilation and bodily transformation in Kafka's work are impossible without passage through a state of being "Negro." Kafka represents this passage in various ways—from reflections on New World slavery and black music to evolutionary theory, biblical allusion, and aesthetic primitivism—each grounded in a concept of writing that is linked to the perceived congenital musicality of the "Negro," and which is bound to his wider conception of aesthetic production. Mark Christian Thompson offers new close readings of canonical texts and undervalued letters and diary entries set in the context of the afterlife of New World slavery and in Czech and German popular culture.