This paper analyzes themes of male insecurities and distrust of the exclusive culture of female sexuality and reproduction in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Vampirism, one of the earliest psychologically ...sophisticated female vampires in Western literature. The doomed heroine, Aurelia, escapes a life of maternal abuse and sexual trauma by marrying the wealthy Count Hippolytus, but his attraction warps into suspicion when she becomes pregnant and loses her appetite for his food. Worried that losing her virginity has activated promiscuity inherited from her late mother, he begins following her and thinks he sees her conspiring with a coven of female ghouls who train her to satisfy her pregnancy cravings by feeding on a male corpse. Real or imagined, this vision confirms his suspicions and leads to their mutual destruction. In my analysis, I explore vampire literature’s early history, its place within Gothic literature, the prominent role of female vampires, their relationship to gender anxieties exacerbated by the Romantic Era’s subversive political movements, and the way in which Hoffmann’s cynical story operates as a misogynistic conspiracy theory aimed at the secret female space of reproduction, symbolized by Aurelia’s cannibalistic pregnancy cravings. As such, it contributes to the destructive folklore of social distrust.
This article aims at considering autobiographical elements in the historical and biographical novel by Peter Hartling “Hölderlin.” P. Hartling narrates about the outstanding poet of German ...Romanticism – Johannes Christian Friedrich Hölderlin. Romanticism is a significant epoch in the history of the formation of German literature, to which many modern German writers have shown interest. The return to the past historical epoch is seen as an artistic device, with the help of which the authors cover those problems of literature and creativity that are relevant at all times. For Hartling himself, the image of Hölderlin is of particular importance – the writer was the chairman of the literary society named after the German poet. The genre of a romanized biography, or historical and biographical novel, the interest for which developed in the second half of the XX-early XXI century is relevant subject of research. Talking about the life of Hölderlin, Hartling demonstrates the interest of modern writers to the literary heritage of the great poet of romanticism, which was not appreciated by contemporaries. At the same time when talking of Hölderlin, Hartling introduces autobiographical elements into the novel, and draws parallels with his own life. Such techniques give the reader a more complete look at the author of the work, allow immersing in the circle of the writer’s interests and understanding those questions of creativity that are of interest to the author.
The contribution intends to examine some passages of the description of the Roman Carnival present in the novel by Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie (1807). After analyzing the writer’s cultural ...background (German idealism, Frühromantik, Enlightenment universalism), I will focus not only on the meaning that the episode takes on within her aesthetics, but above all I will try to identify the peculiar traits of the new modern mentality arising from developments of the French Revolution. In this way, it will be possible to place the novel in a broader cultural and historical perspective and, at the same time, reflect on the meaning taken on by the Carnival rite on the threshold of the modern era.
“It will never be completed, but just be producing forever.” German writer Friedrich Schlegel, who established literature of the German Romantic School, led the way to the modern aesthetic ...production, and without sacrificing its value and inherent qualities. However, the series of thought from Goethe to Schlegel regarding this recognition followed a complex and intricate process. Each of the four writers listed in the title explored the way of the literature unique to modernity in relation to ancient Greek literature which had been completed. They produced modern literature as a practice of creation. Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin gave moral value to the aesthetic act of literature. They thought that human nature could be enhanced by literature and it led human nature into “completion”. The area of beauty must not be eroded by any other value, but they requested the establishment of literary art that empathized with the morality originally situated outside the category of beauty. And when advocating the literary art that had a moral function and led human beings to “completion”, they also planned artworks which aimed for “completion”. On the other hand, Schlegel’s romantic literature, which abandoned from the beginning the idea of “completion”, asserted the way of a new literature based on the thorough autonomy of art. Goethe, who called such an art as “krank （ill）”, however, had a great influence on the establishment of Schlegel’s romantic literature. In this study, I consider the self-understanding of aesthetic modernity by the four writers from German Classicism to German Romanticism, with the keyword “completion”, taking the problem of autonomy and social function of art into view.
The reviewer analyses the monograph Problematic-Thematic Units and Philosophical-Esthetical Parameters of the British Post-Postmodern Novel (Kyiv, 2020) written by Dmytro Drozdovskyi, a Ukrainian ...scholar from Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, member of The European Society for the Study of English (Bulgarian branch). In the monograph, the author has outlined the theory of the post-postmodern novel based on the analysis of the key novels of contemporary British fiction (David Mitchell, Ian McEwan, Sarah waters, Mark Haddon, etc.). The review states that the Ukrainian scholar has developed the theory proposed by Fredric Jameson regarding the post-postmodern features of Cloud Atlas and also discusses the concept of meta-modernity as one of the sections in the post-postmodern literary paradigm in the UK. Drozdovskyi argues that meta-modernism cannot be the only term that explains all the peculiarities of contemporary British fiction, which also cannot be outlined as meta-modern but as post-postmodern. The scholar provides a new theory of the novel based on the exploitation of real and unreal historical facts and imagined alternative histories and multifaceted realities. Furthermore, the reviewer pays attention to the contribution this monograph has for world literary studies spotlighting the theory of literary meta-genre patterns, as Drozdovskyi provides a theory according to which literary periods can be divided into those in which the carnival is the dominant meta-genre pattern (like postmodernism) and those that exploit the mystery as the meta-genre pattern (post-postmodernism). The reviewer analyses the key thematic units explained by Drozdovskyi as the key ones that determine the semiosphere of the contemporary British novel (post-metaphysical and post-positivist thinking of the characters, medicalisation of the humanitarian discourse, and the representation of the temporal unity of different realities). The scholar also states that the post-postmodern British novel exploits the findings of German Romanticism and Kant’s philosophy.
Since the publication of Wuthering Heights in 1847, critics have long recognized the influence of British writers on Emily Brontë, such as Wordsworth, Byron and Shakespeare. In recent years, the ...possible influence of German Romanticism has also been noted by critics such as Maggie Allen and Elisha Cohn. The extent to which Emily Brontë was acquainted with German Romanticism still waits to be investigated in more depth and detail. In this article, I seek to examine this issue by introducing German poet and philosopher Novalis's work Hymns to the Night and the Fragment and making a textual comparison between Novalis's writings and Emily Brontë's novel and lyrical work. Through an examination of the imagery of 'Night', along with a series of related concepts such as Dream, Vision, Slumber and Death in these two authors' writings, I explore Emily Brontë's acquaintance with, and understanding of, German Romantic ideology on a more comprehensive scale than has been done heretofore.
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Abstract
This essay argues for the philosophical standing of Walter Benjamin’s early work and posits a deeper continuity between this early work as a philosopher and the subsequent development of his ...work as a writer. When these fragments are read in proper relation to each other, they reveal for the first time many of the key innovations of Benjamin as a philosopher, as well as his points of influence on Horkheimer and Adorno. His early ‘Program’ critiques the Enlightenment conception of experience as a means for gaining empirical knowledge, and announces the need for a new concept of experience. Benjamin follows through on this program with a method of philosophical enquiry that is by turns fragmentary and constellational, developing a series of provisional notions of experience, which form a constellation with one another: perception, mimesis, language as a medium of experience, observation and memory.
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