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In a new approach to Goethe's Faust I, Evanghelia Stead extensively discusses Moritz Retzsch's twenty-six outline prints (1816) and how their spin-offs made the unfathomable play available to larger reader communities through copying and extensive distribution circuits, including bespoke gifts. The images amply transformed as they travelled throughout Europe and overseas, revealing differences between countries and cultures but also their pliability and resilience whenever remediated.
This interdisciplinary investigation evidences the importance of print culture throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in nations involved in competition and conflict. Retzsch's foundational set crucially engenders parody, and inspires the stage, literature, and three-dimensional objects, well beyond common perceptions of print culture's influence.

This book is available in open access thanks to an Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) grant.
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Germany is considered a lauded land of music: outstanding composers, celebrated performers and famous orchestras exert great international appeal. Since the 19th century, the foundation of this reputation has been the broad mass of musicians who sat in orchestra pits, played in ensembles for dances or provided the musical background in silent movie theatres. Martin Rempe traces their lives and working worlds, including their struggle for economic improvement and societal recognition. His detailed portrait of the profession ‘from below’ sheds new light on German musical life in the modern era.
Richard Wagner and the Articulation of a German Opera, 1798-1876
By examining theoretical debates about the nature of nineteenth-century German opera and analyzing the genre’s development and its international dissemination, this book shows German opera’s entanglement with national identity formation. The thorough study of German opera debates in the first half of the nineteenth century highlights the esthetic and ideological significance of this relatively neglected repertoire, and helps to contextualize Richard Wagner’s attempts to define German opera and to gain a reputation as the German opera composer par excellence. By interpreting Wagner’s esthetic endeavors as a continuation of previous campaigns for the emancipation of German opera, this book adds an original and significant perspective to discussions about Wagner’s relation to German nationalism.
In Expressionism and Poster Design in Germany 1905–1925, Kathleen Chapman re-defines Expressionism by situating it in relation to the most common type of picture in public space during the Wilhelmine twentieth century, the commercial poster. Focusing equally on visual material and contemporaneous debates surrounding art, posters, and the image in general, this study reveals that conceptions of a “modern” image were characterized not so much by style or mode of production and distribution, but by a visual rhetoric designed to communicate more directly than words. As instances of such rhetoric, Expressionist art and posters emerge as equally significant examples of this modern image, demonstrating the interconnectedness of the aesthetic, the utilitarian, and the commercial in European modernism.
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Oscar Wilde in Vienna is the first book-length study in English of the reception of Oscar Wilde’s works in the German-speaking world. Charting the plays’ history on Viennese stages between 1903 and 2013, it casts a spotlight on the international reputation of one of the most popular English-language writers while contributing to Austrian cultural history in the long twentieth century.

Drawing on extensive archival material, the book examines the appropriation of Wilde's plays against the background of political crises and social transformations. It unravels the mechanisms of cultural transfer and canonisation within an environment positioned — like Wilde himself — at the crossroads of centre and periphery, tradition and modernity.
Volume Editor:
Shakespeare as German Author, edited by John McCarthy, revisits in particular the formative phase of German Shakespeare reception 1760-1830. Following a detailed introduction to the historical and theoretical parameters of an era in search of its own literary voice, six case studies examine Shakespeare’s catalytic role in reshaping German aesthetics and stage production. They illuminate what German speakers found so appealing (or off-putting) about Shakespeare’s spirit, consider how translating it nurtured new linguistic and aesthetic sensibilities, and reflect on its relationship to German Geist through translation and cultural transfer theory. In the process, they shed new light, e.g., on the rise of Hamlet to canonical status, the role of women translators, and why Titus Andronicus proved so influential in twentieth-century theater performance.

Contributors are: Lisa Beesley, Astrid Dröse, Johanna Hörnig, Till Kinzel, John A. McCarthy, Curtis L. Maughan, Monika Nenon, Christine Nilsson.
Mapping German Cities in Sebastian Münster’s 'Cosmographia'
In Networked Nation: Mapping German Cities in Sebastian Münster’s 'Cosmographia', Jasper van Putten examines the groundbreaking woodcut city views in the German humanist Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia. This description of the world, published in Basel from 1544 to 1628, glorified the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and engendered the city book genre. Van Putten argues that Münster’s network of city view makers and contributors—from German princes and artists to Swiss woodcutters, draftsmen, and printers—expressed their local and national cultural identities in the views. The Cosmographia, and the city books it inspired, offer insights into the development of German and Swiss identity from 1550 to Switzerland’s independence from the empire in 1648.
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This volume collects twenty of Lawrence Kramer’s seminal writings on art song (especially Lieder), opera, and word-music relationships. All examine the formative role of culture in musical meaning and performance, and all seek to demonstrate the complexity and nuance that arise when words and music interact. The diverse topics include words and music, music and poetry, subjectivity, the sublime, mourning, sexuality, decadence, orientalism, the body, war, Romanticism, modernity, and cultural change. Several of the earlier essays have been revised for this volume, which also contains a preface by the author and a foreword by Richard Leppert. The volume should be essential reading for scholars, students, performing musicians, and other music-lovers interested in musicology, word-music relationships, cultural studies, aesthetics, and intermediality.

Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives examines the continuing relevance of Büchner in the early twenty-first century in terms of politics, science, philosophy, aesthetics, cultural studies and performance studies. It situates Büchner’s interdisciplinary work in relation to the philosophical, scientific and religious discourses of his time, while also investigating the ways in which Büchner’s intersectional writings anticipated – sometimes uncannily – questions and problems which were to become central concerns in modernism and after. The nineteen essays in the book, some in English and some in German, uniquely combine close readings of individual passages and images with wide-ranging intertextual comparisons, linking Büchner to more than twenty-five writers, thinkers and theoreticians from his time and ours.

Der Band Georg Büchner: Contemporary Perspectives beschäftigt sich mit Büchners anhaltender Aktualität in den Bereichen Politik, Naturwissenschaft, Philosophie, Ästhetik, Kulturwissenschaft und Theater. Er setzt Büchners interdisziplinäres Werk in Beziehung zu den philosophischen, naturwissenschaftlichen und religiösen Themen seiner Zeit, untersucht aber auch wie sein Schreiben auf manchmal verblüffende Weise Fragen und Probleme vorwegnimmt, die für die Moderne und die Nachmoderne bis zum heutigen Tag zentral werden sollten. Die neunzehn, teils auf Englisch, teils auf Deutsch verfassten Beiträge zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass sie eingehende Einzelinterpretationen bestimmter Werkstellen mit weitreichenden intertextuellen Bezügen zu mehr als 25 SchriftstellerInnen, KünstlerInnen, DenkerInnen, und TheoretikerInnen verbinden.
Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript
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In Apocalyptic Cartography: Thematic Maps and the End of the World in a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript, Chet Van Duzer and Ilya Dines analyse Huntington Library HM 83, an unstudied manuscript produced in Lübeck, Germany. The manuscript contains a rich collection of world maps produced by an anonymous but strikingly original cartographer. These include one of the earliest programs of thematic maps, and a remarkable series of maps that illustrate the transformations that the world was supposed to undergo during the Apocalypse. The authors supply detailed discussion of the maps and transcriptions and translations of the Latin texts that explain the maps. Copies of the maps in a fifteenth-century manuscript in Wolfenbüttel prove that this unusual work did circulate.

A brief article about this book on the website of National Geographic can be found here.