Dear Colleagues,
I'd like to draw your attention to a new monograph which is now available:
Mary Cosgrove, Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar
German Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014).
In German Studies the literary phenomenon of melancholy, which has a
longstanding and diverse history in European letters, has typically
been associated with the Early Modern and Baroque periods,
Romanticism, and the crisis of modernity. This association, alongside
the dominant psychoanalytical view of melancholy in German memory
discourses since the 1960s, has led to its neglect as an important
literary mode in postwar German literature, a situation the present
book seeks to redress by identifying and analyzing epochal postwar
works that use melancholy traditions to comment on German history in
the aftermath of the Holocaust. It focuses on five writers - Günter
Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Iris
Hanika - who reflect on the legacy of Auschwitz as intellectuals
trying to negotiate a relationship to the past based on the stigma of
belonging to a perpetrator collective (Grass, Sebald, Hanika) or,
broadly speaking, to the victim collective (Weiss, Hildesheimer), in
order to develop a melancholy ethics of memory for the Holocaust and
the Nazi past. It will appeal to scholars and students of German
Studies, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Cultural Memory,
and Holocaust Studies.
http://www.camden-house.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14430
Dr Mary Cosgrove
Reader in German
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
University of Edinburgh
David Hume Tower
EH8 9JX
Tel: +44 (0)131 6503639
Email: [log in to unmask]
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Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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