A collection and translation 20 of the author's essays and addresses relating to Austrian culture.

Literary theory flourished in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century, but its relation to Western literary scholarship is complex. This book sheds light on the entangled histories of exchange and influence both within the region known as Central and Eastern Europe, and between the region and the West. The exchange of ideas between scholars in the East and West was facilitated by both personal and institutional relations, both official and informal encounters. For the longest time, however, intellectual exchange was thwarted by political tensions that led to large parts of Central and Eastern Europe being isolated from the West. A few literary theories nevertheless made it into Western scholarly discourses via exiled scholars. Some of these scholars, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, become widely known in the West and their thought was transposed onto new, Western cultural contexts; others, such as Ol’ga Freidenberg, were barely noticed outside of Russian and Poland. This volume draws attention to the schools, circles, and concepts that shaped the development of theory in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the histoire croisée – the history of translations, transformations, and migrations – that conditioned its relationship with the West.

Comprising more than 65 pieces - journal articles, reviews, extended essays, sketches, aphorisms, and fragments - this volume shows the range of Walter Benjamin's writing. His topics here include poetry, fiction, drama, history, religion, love, violence, morality and mythology.

The translations collected here-Death and the Fool, Electra, and The Tower represent different periods and interests in his career as a dramatist. Since World War II, Hugo von Hofmannsthal has regained his place as a classic of modern European literature. The translations collected here-Death and the Fool, Electra, and The Tower-represent different periods and interests in his career as a dramatist. Yet, as the critical introduction on Hofmannsthal's tragic theater indicates, all three plays, written in different theatrical idioms, reveal a unified and developing conception of man's estate in the modern world. Hofmannsthal rejected the current fashions of the modern stage but was nonetheless a keen observer of his time. His deliberate indebtedness to the great theaters of the past allowed him to enlarge the scope of his own dramaturgy and to use a more articulate language than that afforded by the conventions of the modern realistic theater. This book includes the 1927 theater version of Hofmannsthal's last great work, The Tower, available for the first time in English translation.

Some of the first figures the Nazis conscripted in their rise to power were rhetoricians devoted to popularizing the German vocabulary of Leben (life). This fascinating study reexamines this movement through one of its most prominent exponents, Ludwig Klages, revealing the philosophical-cultural crises and political volatility of the Weimar era.