Thomas Austenfeld

New essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles.

European and American Perspectives

Robert Lowell in a New Century

Addressing a perceived gap in critiques of the works of four North American women expatriate authors in 1930s Germany, Austenfeld (language and literature, North Georgia State College/State U.) analyzes their responses to fascism as part of their creative development. Exploring the theme of personal ethics, the author compares Kay Boyle's novels such as Death of a Man (1936) with Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools (1962). He also discusses Jean Stafford's collected stories of Heidelberg and Lillian Hellman's play, Watch on the Rhine. c. Book News Inc.

Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman

American Women Writers and the Nazis

Jens Herlth

Dimiter Daphinoff

Terrorism as a factor of public life has generated far-reaching, and as yet underexplored, questions about narrative and representation. Different textual forms can investigate both the symbolic and the performative character of terroristic acts. Diverse literary traditions, ranging from countries of Eastern and Western Europe to North America and the Middle East, bring their respective historical imaginations to bear on such representations. The essays collected in this volume join together in a transdisciplinary effort to understand the role of narrative practice in all its varieties in approaching the phenomenon of terrorism, whether historical or contemporaneous. (Series: Swiss: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Vol. 7)

Terrorism and Narrative Practice

This volume in the Critical Insights series brings together a set of materials to serve both as an introduction to Barbara Kingsolver's writings and as a guide to scholarly readings of her work. The volume begins with a general introduction to Kingsolver's life and work that provides a context for the beginning reader. Biographical data shedding light on her fiction and essays are provided in the sketch by Marilyn Kongslie and Karen L. Arnold, and Katherine Ryder's sketch for The Paris Review shows us Kingsolver at her most political, especially in her essay collection Small Wonder (2002).

Barbara Kingsolver

Containing pieces by distinguished scholars including Darlene Harbour Unrue and Robert Brinkmeyer, this book is the first full investigation of the links between Porter's only novel and European intellectual history. Beginning with Sebastian Brant, author of the late medieval Narrenschiff, whom she acknowledges in her Preface to Ship of Fools, Porter's image of Europe emerges as more complex, more knowledgeable, and more politically nuanced than previous critics of her novel have acknowledged. Ship of Fools is in conversation with Europe's humanistic tradition as well as with the political moments of 1931 and 1962; i.e., the years that elapsed from the novel's conception to its completion. The novel and the 1965 film based upon it intervene into the history of film, the assessment of Weimar Germany, and Porter's clear-eyed judgment of her own times through the lens of her art.

Thomas Austenfeld

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