«What is particularly refreshing about this book is its editors' ability to focus on specifically aesthetic and literary concerns while simultaneously addressing larger issues of German national identity and politics... Both the editors and the contributors to this volume are to be congratulated on a provocative addition to the slowly growing library of works dealing with the cultural implications of German unification.» (Stephen Brockmann, The German Quarterly)
The Individual, Identity and Innovation
Signals from Contemporary Literature and the New Germany
herausgegeben von Arthur Williams und Stuart ParkesThe volume explores aspects of individual identity and innovation in contemporary German literature with particular reference to the implications of German unification. Approaches to biography and autobiography, cultural roots, sexuality, and gender are placed in relevant ideological and aesthetic frameworks to provide a broad stock-taking of the current situation from the individual point of view. Analyses of recent work by such contemporary writers as Strauß, Handke, Enzensberger, von Westphalen, Wolf, Königsdorf, Liebmann, Krauß, Neumann, Specht, Jelinek, Fichte, Nöstlinger, Lorenc and Walser are complemented by discussions of Johnson, Canetti, Bernhard and Celan and by critical appraisals of theatre (Wendestücke), postmodernism and the poetry of the younger generation in the eastern Länder, and the prospects of an all-German literature.