Rainer Maria Rilke

Robert Vilain

Susan Ranson

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, whose poetry explores themes of death, love, and loss. This bilingual edition fully reflects Rilke's poetic development and includes the full text of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in accurate and sensitive new translations.

With Parallel German Text

Selected Poems

Eric Robertson

This volume brings together for the first time essays on both Claire and Yvan Goll. The Golls made distinctive contributions to the literary cultures of France and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Their writings shed much light upon their respective positions within the exile communities created by the First and Second World Wars, and in the inter-war avant-gardes of Paris and Berlin, whose cosmopolitanism and eclecticism they came to embody. The Golls' literary output was shaped by, and in turn helped to enrich, the experimental trends that often challenged or transcended conventional notions according to which genre and choice of literary language are stable phenomena. The essays in this volume focus on texts by Yvan and Claire Goll in French and German, and in various literary forms: these are examined in relation to contem-porary literary, artistic and musical developments, and place particular emphasis on collaborative and interdisciplinary works. The analyses explore a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including inter-textuality, Trivialliteratur, psychoanalysis, feminism, cultural marginality and négritude. This collection represents a distinctive and wide-ranging contribution to the study of Yvan and Claire Goll at a time of renewed critical interest in their lives and work.

Texts and Contexts

Yvan Goll--Claire Goll

Professor of German and Head of the School of Modern Languages Robert Vilain

Hugo von Hofmannsthal became famous at the age of sixteen for poetry and lyrical drama of almost uncanny facility and beauty. Yet he ceased to write lyric poetry almost completely in the early 1900s and his fictional farewell to poetry, the so-called 'Chandos Letter', is a paradigm for theuncertainty and instability of Modernism. The verse of the 1890s, the 'lyrical decade', is generally felt to have been enhanced by his interest in the French Symbolists and the Symbolist-inspired tutelage of Stefan George. However, with analyses of verse and prose poetry from the 1890s, this bookargues that Symbolism was a fundamentally inhibiting influence, ultimately responsible for the crisis in Hofmannsthal's poetic writing. 'Das Gesprach uber Gedichte', written soon after 'Ein Brief', in 1903, makes it clear how the crisis was a personal one and does not imply the general impossibilityof future writing, as is often suggested. As a theory of poetry, it acknowledges the importance of French Symbolism but suggests how it was ultimately a dummy aesthetic that had previously overlaid and stifled Hofmannsthal's own Romantic leanings.

The Poetry of Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism

Judith Beniston

Austrian Studies is an annual journal reflecting sustained interest in the distinctive cultural traditions of the Habsburg Empire and the Austrian Republic. By publishing a wide range of articles in English, together with a selection of book reviews, it aims to make recent research accessible to a broadly based international readership. Literature is considered in relation to psychology, philosophy, political theory, music, theatre, film, and the visual arts. 'Austrian' includes German-language culture of former areas of the Habsburg Empire, such as Prague and the Bukovina, as well as the work of people of Austrian origin living abroad. Austrian interactions with other linguistic and ethnic groups - the Jewish communities of Austria-Hungary, for example - will also be taken into account. theme, and reviews of the most important recent publications in the field of Austrian Studies. Each volume will also include a substantial review article devoted to keeping readers up-to-date with the very latest Austrian literature and with major cultural debates and events.

Austria and France

Mann, "Doktor Faustus"

Eleoma Joshua

The influence of foreign cultures on German literature and other cultural productions since the 18th century.

Cultural Exchange in German Literature

Karen Leeder

A collection of specially commissioned essays providing an overview of the life, works and contexts of this important modernist poet.

The Cambridge Companion to Rilke

Andreas Kramer

This is the first complete bibliography of the writings of Yvan Goll (1891-1950), the French-German poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and translator. The first part gives full details of Goll's publications during his lifetime, and includes books and pamphlets, contributions to periodicals, newspapers and anthologies, books and journals edited by Goll, translations by Goll, and his published letters. The second part makes it possible to trace the dissemination of Goll's work, with posthumous first publications, posthumous reprints in periodicals and anthologies, translations of Goll's works by others (into twenty languages) and musical collaborations and settings. A comprehensive index of titles or first lines allows the user to trace single works through the various sections; there are also indexes of writers translated by Goll and letters by recipient. This bibliography documents the huge scope of the writings of an author who wrote in three major languages and published in many countries. It contains a wide range of references to texts hitherto unknown, many of them items in journals and newspapers, and is by far the most reliable source to date of what Goll actually wrote.

A Bibliography of the Primary Works

Yvan Goll

Often regarded as the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) remains one of the most influential figures of European modernism. In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's critical contexts are explored in detail: his relationship with philosophy and the visual arts, his place within modernism and his relationship to European literature, and his reception in Europe and beyond. With its invaluable guide to further reading and a chronology of Rilke's life and work, this Companion will provide an accessible, engaging account of this extraordinary poet whose legacy looms so large today.

The chronological range covered by the individual essays is more than two hundred years, from the Classical Enlightenment to the early twenty-first century. Some of the studies encompassed by this volume undertake the analysis of one composer's settings of a particular poet's work - albeit with rather more critical rigour. Others trace the ways in which a literary text is modified and adapted before and as it develops as one of the principal components of an opera. Several share new insights into the complex relationships of individual works with the literary and musical traditions out of which they emerge (or which they transform and renew) - or set such works in the political contexts of their genesis or reception, often using a key historical moment, a turning-point or a 'snapshot', as the starting-point for a wide-ranging investigation. In some cases the words and the music are those of the same 'composer', the relationship here shedding light on the process of composition itself. Literary works are often scrutinized for the light they shed on a musician's creative processes, but the importance of music to writers - as audiences, but also as amateur or even semi-professional practitioners - is no less important as an investigative standpoint.

Robert Vilain

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