German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

Reception, Adaptation, Transformation

Lynne Tatlock editor Matt Erlin editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published:12th Oct '05

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America cover

Essays examining the circulation and adaptation of German culture in the United States during the long 19th century. Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, this volume emphasizes the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. The fourteen essays by scholars from the US and Germany treat such topics as translation, the reading of German literature in America, the adaptation of German ideas and educational ideals, the reception and transformation of European genres of writing, and the status of the "German" and the "European" in celebrations of American culture and criticisms of American racism. The volume contributes to the ongoing re-conception of American culture as significantly informed by non-English-speaking European cultures. It also participates in the efforts of historians and literary scholars to re-theorize the construction of national cultures. Questions regarding hybridity, cultural agency, and strategies of acculturation have long been at the center of postcolonial studies, but as this volume demonstrates, these phenomena are not merely operative in encounters between colonizers and colonized: they are also fundamental to the early American reception and appropriation of German cultural materials. Contributors: Hinrich C. Seeba, Eric Ames, Claudia Liebrand, Paul Michael Lützeler, Kirsten Belgum, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Linda Rugg, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Gerhard Weiss, Lorie Vanchena. Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Matt Erlin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

This volume is to be highly recommended for all those interested in Germany's contribution to America's cultural development in the nineteenth century. * MONATSHEFTE *
The essays collected in this well organized volume make a major contribution to our understanding of German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. * ARCHIV FÜR DAS STUDIUM DER NEUEREN SPRACHEN UND LITERATUREN *
This anthology provides any number of interesting insights about cultural exchanges and cultural transfers prior to WWI. These exchanges became...an integral part of an American intellectual and popular culture landscape.... In an informative and well informed introduction the editors outline major issues regarding the burgeoning field of cultural transfer studies. The subsequent four parts capture the various aspects in which cultural transfer may be studied most successfully. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *
In all the contributions original or little-known circumstances and constellations are presented that problematize the presence of German cultural products in the USA as well as the process of German-American identity formation. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *

ISBN: 9781571133083

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 688g

358 pages