The Individual, Identity, and Innovation Signals from Contemporary Literature and the New Germany

The volume explores aspects of individual identity and innovation in contemporary German literature with particular reference to the implications of German unification. Approaches to biography and autobiography, cultural roots, sexuality, and gender are placed in relevant ideological and aesthetic frameworks to provide a broad stock-taking of the current situation from the individual point of view. Analyses of recent work by such contemporary writers as Strauss, Handke, Enzensberger, von Westphalen, Wolf, Konigsdorf, Liebmann, Krauss, Neumann, Specht, Jelinek, Fichte, Nostlinger, Lorenc and Walser are complemented by discussions of Johnson, Canetti, Bernhard and Celan and by critical appraisals of theatre ("Wendestucke"), postmodernism and the poetry of the younger generation in the eastern "Lander," and the prospects of an all-German literature."