Ritchie Robertson

This magisterial history--sure to become the definitive work on the subject--recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the "long eighteenth century," from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Any account of the Enlightenment must be in large part a history of ideas. But Robertson argues that it is not solely a philosophical movement; the Enlightenment saw the publication of the Encyclopédie, which is not only a historical and philosophical compendium, but also an illustrated guide to all sorts of contemporary machinery, handicrafts, and trades aimed to improve people's lives in immediate and practical ways. Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against specific evils such as capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot with ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. Robertson gives due attention to philosophical and theological debates, but also looks to literature, music, and the visual arts as prominent means of conveying enlightenment ideas. In seeking to correct one-sided views of the Enlightenment, Robertson ultimately puts forward his own. He does not reduce this transformative period to a formula, but instead makes the claim that indeed the Enlightenment was an attempt to increase human happiness, and to claim that happiness was possible in this world, without needing any compensatory belief in a better one beyond the grave.

The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790

The Enlightenment

Joyce Crick

Franz Kafka

This new translation includes Kafka's two published collections, A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist with other, uncollected stories, aphorisms, and parables that have become part of the Kafka canon. Enigmatic, satirical, often bleakly humorous, the stories meditate on art and artists and the human experience. Includes an introduction and notes.

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories

Robert Musil

Mike Mitchell

'between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate' Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Törless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he struggles to come to terms with his conflicting emotions. Through his relationship with two other boys Törless is led into sadistic and sexual encounters with a third pupil which both repel and fascinate him. Estranged from everyday life, Törless gradually learns to accept his experiences and describe them with analytical precision. The novel is based on the author's own experiences at an Austrian military academy. A school story with a difference, Törless extends the scope of fiction with its non-judgemental presentation of transgressive sexuality and violence. It is a profoundly disturbing exploration of a non-moral outlook on life and of dictatorial attitudes that prefigure the outbreak of the First World War and the rise of fascism. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Confusions of Young Törless

In 1878 the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold wrote: 'Goethe is the greatest poet of modern times... because having a very considerable gift for poetry, he was at the same time, in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.' In this Very Short Introduction Ritchie Robertson covers the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): scientist, administrator, artist, art critic and supreme literary writer in a vast variety of genres. Looking at Goethe's poetry, novels and drama pieces, as well as his travel writing, autobiography, and essays on art and aesthetics, Robertson analyses some of the key themes in his works: love, nature, religion and tragedy. Dispelling the misconception of Goethe as a sedate Victorian sage, Robertson shows how much of his art was rooted in turbulent personal conflicts, and draws on recent research to present a complete portrait of the scientific work and political activity which accompanied Goethe's writings. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Goethe: A Very Short Introduction

Karl Philipp Moritz

Called a 'biography' by Moritz, this book is autobiographical. It is also a searching psychological and religious discourse, describing Moritz's spiritual journey and his struggle to move beyond the narrow Pietistic world of his youth

A Psychological Novel

Anton Reiser

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Written with passion by experts in their field, concise and accessible books feature color illustrations and explore a sweeping range of topics, including history, philosophy, religion, mathematics and more.

Kafka

Theodor Fontane

After marrying a Baron twice her age and moving to a remote Baltic port, Effi Briest begins an affair that threatens to ruin her marriage and her life.

Effi Briest

Sigmund Freud

Anthea Bell

"A Case of hysteria, popularly known as the Dora Case, affords a rare insight into how Freud dealt with patients and interpreted what they told him. The narrative became a crucial text in the evolution of his theories, combining his studies on hysteria and his new theory of dream-interpretation with early insights into the development of sexuality." --from back cover.

(Dora)

A Case of Hysteria

Ritchie (St John's College Robertson, University of Oxford)

Franz Kafka is one of the most intriguing writers of the 20th century. In this text the author provides an up-to-date introduction to Kafka, beginning with an examination of his life and then discussing some of the major themes that emerge in Kafka's work.

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction

Edward Timms

"With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the break-up of the Soviet Union, nationalism and its effects are once more at the forefront of attention. However, to understand more fully what is happening now it is valuable to look back into the past and examine the construction and collapse of the multi-national Habsburg Empire." "After examining how the Holy Roman Empire became the Austrian Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this collection of essays charts the subsequent growth of distinctive regional identities in Hungary, Galicia, Trieste and Croatia, before looking at the official attempts to define 'ethnic identity' and what harm resulted from their good intentions. Differing constructions of Austrian identity among Jewish novelists, women writers and art historians - besides the literary works of Hofmannsthal and Musil - are then analysed, as are the attempts to devise a new Austrian identity under the semi-fascist rule of the 1930s and the early years of the post-war Second Republic. Concluding with a general analysis contrasting the gradual integration of nations in present-day western Europe with the dissolution of multi-national states in the east, Austrian Studies 5 is both a challenging reappraisal of a fallen Empire and a timely reflection of an on-going question." --Book Jacket.

National Identity in Historical Perspective

The Habsburg Legacy

Through examining the interactions between public performance and national identity, it provides a wide-ranging account of one of the defining features of Austrian culture.

From Mozart to Jelinek

Theatre and Performance in Austria

An accessible and informative study of the life and work of this vaunted German philosopher. In this concise yet comprehensive critical biography, Ritchie Robertson examines the work of Friedrich Nietzsche within the context of his life. The book traces Nietzsche’s development from outstanding classical scholar to cultural critic, who measured Imperial Germany by the standards of ancient Greece. It follows him on his path from a prophet (in the persona of Zarathustra) to a savage polemicist against modern liberal values, offering a “philosophy of the future.” Robertson argues that Nietzsche’s middle-period writings offer a subtle and searching analysis of his culture, more rewarding than the strident and often-controversial later works. The book also assesses Nietzsche’s claim to be continuing the Enlightenment and shows that he valued reason, evidence, and fact, without which his historical case against Christianity would make no sense.

Friedrich Nietzsche

This is a study of mock-epic poetry in English, French, and German from the 1720s to the 1840s. While mock-heroic poetry is a parodistic counterpart to serious epic, mock-epic poetry starts by parodying epic but moves on to much wider and richer literary explorations; it relies heavily on intertextual allusion to other works, on narratorial irony, on the sympathetic and sometimes libertine presentation of sexual relatons, and on a range of satirical devices. It includes well-known texts (Pope's Dunciad, Byron's Don Juan, Heine's Atta Troll) and others which are little known (Ratschky's Melchior Striregel, Parny's La Guerre des Dieux). It owes a marked debt to Italian romance epic (especially Ariosto). The study places these texts in the literary context of the decline of serious epic, which helped mock epic to flourish, and of the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' which questioned the authority of Homer's and Virgil's epics; and it relates their substance to contemporary debates about questions of religion and gender.

Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine

本书是一本研究托马斯·曼的论文集,由16名著名学者从不同层面对托马斯·曼的小说、评论文章、日记等作品及其生平进行了深入而全面的评析和论述。

托马斯·曼

The German-Jewish Dialogue offers a unique selection of short stories, plays, poems, essays, letters, and diary entries that illustrates through literature the history of German-Jewish relations. From the eighteenth century, when civil rights for Jews were first proposed, through the 1990s and contemporary considerations of the Holocaust, this anthology sheds light on the interaction between Jews in Germany and Austria and their fellow Gentile Germans with works of high literary merit, each introduced with a short preface. Ritche Robertson's lucid introduction puts the selections in their historical context and his translations make available in English--in some cases for the first time--both Jewish writers on various aspects of Jewish experience and responses of Gentile writers to the Jews in their midst.

An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749-1993

The German-Jewish Dialogue

The Jewish Question in German Literature, 1749-1939 is an erudite and searching literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Trying to avoid hindsight, and drawing on a wide range of literary texts, Ritchie Robertson offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. He examines both literary portrayals of Jews by Gentile writers - whether antisemitic, friendly, or ambivalent - and efforts to reinvent Jewish identities by the Jews themselves, in response to antisemitism culminating in Zionism. No other study by a single author deals with German-Jewish relations so comprehensively and over such a long period of literary history. Robertson's new work will prove stimulating for anyone interested in the modern Jewish experience, as well as for scholars and students of German fiction, prose, and political culture.

Emancipation and its Discontents

The 'Jewish Question' in German Literature, 1749-1939

Judentum - Gesellschaft - Literatur. Sonderausgabe

Anne Fuchs

Florian Krobb

Katrin Maria Kohl

New essays examine 20th-c. Austrian literature in relation to history, politics, and popular culture.

Ritchie Robertson

About

Books

Join the club