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The series in German medieval studies includes central topics of current research debates in medieval studies and provides a place for groundbreaking research in the subject literature. The series is intended to give international and young researchers/research teams the possibility to effectively present innovative surveys and discussions to the scientific community. The series sees itself as a 'young' research forum with a high standard of quality and is therefore also open to excellent degree theses, should they enhance the series.

TheBildungsroman, or \"novel of formation,\" has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. InFormative Fictions, Tobias Boes argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what Boes calls \"cosmopolitan remainders,\" identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation. InFormative Fictions, Boes presents readings of a number of novels-Goethe'sWilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann'sThe Epigones, Gustav Freytag'sDebit and Credit, Alfred Döblin'sBerlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann'sDoctor Faustusamong them-that have always been felt to be particularly \"German\" and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.

Lyric Address in Dutch Literature, 1250-1800' provides accessible and comprehensive readings of ten Dutch lyrical poems, discussing each poem's historical context, revealing its political or ideological framing, religious elements, or the self-representational interests of the poet. The book focuses on how the use of the speaker's \"I\" creates distance or proximity to the social context of the time. Close, detailed analysis of rhetorical techniques, such as the use of the apostrophe, illuminates the ways in which poetry reveals tensions in society.

John argues that shifting the focus from the text to the efficacy of performance requires broadening our concept of performance beyond what occurs on stage and its critical reception to include the daily life of the society that provides its context. It follows from this semiotic approach that there can be no fixed text or understanding of Egmont or of Goethe himself - only multiple images. John's exploration of image includes literary motifs, acting, staging, and social role playing, with particular reference to Goethe's development as an artist and cultural icon. In addition to presenting a comprehensive analysis of the play and a discussion of Egmont's reception from its first appearance to the present (including productions on both stage and screen), John provides an in-depth performance analysis based on the theories of Alter, Burns, Carson, Fischer-Lichte, Goffman, Pavis, and Schechner. The book includes the complete Mannheim manuscript (M372), critically edited and published as a performance text for the first time.

InBenjamin's Library, Jane O. Newman offers, for the first time in any language, a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work,Origin of the German Tragic Dramathat systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. Taking into account the literary and cultural contexts of Benjamin's work, Newman recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years. To date, the significance of the Baroque forOrigin of the German Tragic Dramahas been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. Armed with extraordinary historical, bibliographical, philological, and orthographic research, Newman shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, she challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies. The result is a deeply learned book that will infuse much-needed life into the study of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Kleist was an important dramatist at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Käthchen was one of his greatest stage successes. Reeve presents a brief outline of the Kleist family involvement in the Prussian aristocracy and Kleist's reactions to his background. He also surveys the literary critics' attempts to come to terms with Käthchen, noting a revisionist trend which associates Kleist with the bourgeois liberalism of his time. While acknowledging the influence of the German Enlightenment, Reeve argues that the most significant influence on Kleist was his noble heritage. Reeve's close textual analysis of Das Käthchen von Heilbronn uses the model of the aristocrat which draws upon Nietzsche's Was ist vornehm? and the works of Anthony Ludovici, John H. Kautsky, and others, a model which has remained virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages. Reeve examines Kleist's use of symbolic and descriptive names in Käthchen, showing how they emphasize his ties to the aristocratic, and compares Kleist's drama to two other plays featuring socially forbidden love, Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe and Friedrich Hebbel's Agnes Bernauer. Despite his efforts to the contrary, Heinrich von Kleist was unable to ignore or deny his aristocratic heritage. It left an indelible mark on his works, especially, as Reeve demonstrates, Das Käthchen von Heilbronn.

Reeve provides a detailed discussion of Klesel's importance in Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg and examines possible predecessors for the Federfuchser: Wurm from Friedrich von Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, the Sekretär in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die natürliche Tochter, and Leonhard in Friedrich Hebbel's Maria Magdalene. He focuses on the features they share, such as deep-seated resentment of social superiors who, by a mere accident of birth, have power over them and, above all, the cunning that they use to overcome their social disqualifications.

Through a close reading of novels by Ulrike Kolb, Irmtraud Morgner, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar, Bernhard Schlink, Peter Schneider, and Uwe Timm, this book traces the cultural memory of the 1960s student movement in German fiction, revealing layers of remembering and forgetting that go beyond conventional boundaries of time and space. These novels engage this contestation by constructing a palimpsest of memories that reshape readers' understanding of the 1960s with respect to the end of the Cold War, the legacy of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Topographically, these novels refute assertions that East Germans were isolated from the political upheaval that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. Through their aesthetic appropriations and subversions, these multicultural contributions challenge conventional understandings of German identity and at the same time lay down claims of belonging within a German society that is more openly diverse than ever before.