Best German Literary Criticism Books
Here you will get Best German Literary Criticism Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (Hackett Classics)
Author: by Jackson Crawford
Published at: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (March 5, 2015)
ISBN: 978-1624663567
“The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a Modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised! And well worth the wait. These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological and literary importance, containing the lion’s share of information that survives today about the gods and heroes of pre-Christian Scandinavians, their unique vision of the beginning and end of the world, etc.
Jackson Crawford’s modern versions of these poems are authoritative and fluent and often very gripping. With their individual headnotes and complementary general introduction, they supply today’s readers with most of what they need to know in order to understand and appreciate the beliefs, motivations, and values of the Vikings.” -Dick Ringler, Professor Emeritus of English and Scandinavian Studies at the University of WisconsinMadison
2. The Poetic Edda (Oxford World's Classics)
Author: by Carolyne Larrington
Published at: Oxford University Press; Second edition (September 1, 2014)
ISBN: 978-0199675340
‘She sees, coming up a second time,Earth from the ocean, eternally green;the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,over the mountain hunting fish.’After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed.
The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress’s Prophecy which recounts the creation of the world, and looks forward to its destruction and rebirth. In this great collection of Norse-Icelandic mythological and heroic poetry, the exploits of gods and humans are related.
The one-eyed Odin, red-bearded Thor, Loki the trickster, the lovely goddesses and the giants who are their enemies walk beside the heroic Helgi, Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, Brynhild the shield-maiden, and the implacable Gudrun. New in this revised translation are the quest-poem The Lay of Svipdag and The Waking of Angantyr, in which a girl faces down her dead father to retrieve his sword.
Comic, tragic, instructive, grandiose, witty and profound, the poems of the Edda have influenced artists from Wagner to Tolkien and a new generation of video-game and film makers. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe.
3. The Essential Goethe
Author: by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Published at: Princeton University Press; Reprint edition (June 12, 2018)
ISBN: 978-0691181042
The most comprehensive one-volume collection of Goethe’s writings ever published in EnglishThe Essential Goethe is the most comprehensive and representative one-volume collection of Goethe’s writings ever published in English. It provides English-language readers easier access than ever before to the widest range of work by one of the greatest writers in world history.
Goethe’s work as playwright, poet, novelist, and autobiographer is fully represented. In addition to the works for which he is most famous, including Faust Part I and the lyric poems, the volume features important literary works that are rarely published in Englishincluding the dramas Egmont, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Torquato Tasso and the bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a foundational work in the history of the novel.
The volume also offers a selection of Goethe’s essays on the arts, philosophy, and science, which give access to the thought of a polymath unrivalled in the modern world. Primarily drawn from Princeton’s authoritative twelve-volume Goethe edition, the translations are highly readable and reliable modern versions by scholars of Goethe.
4. The Arcades Project
Author: by Walter Benjamin
Published at: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press; Third Printing edition (March 30, 2002)
ISBN: 978-0674008021
“To great writers,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years-“the theater,” as Benjamin called it, “of all my struggles and all my ideas.” Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism-Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as “Fashion,” “Boredom,” “Dream City,” “Photography,” “Catacombs,” “Advertising,” “Prostitution,” “Baudelaire,” and “Theory of Progress.” His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things-a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.
5. Independent People
Author: by Halldor Laxness
Published at: Vintage; 1st Vintage International ed edition (January 14, 1997)
ISBN: 978-0679767923
From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author, a magnificent, epic novel”funny, clever, sardonic and brilliant” (Annie Proulx)at last available to contemporary American readers. Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People recalls both Iceland’s medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter.
If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book’s protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man.
But Bjartur’s spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.
6. Goethe's Faust
Author: by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Published at: Anchor; Fifth or Later Edition (December 4, 1962)
ISBN: 978-0385031141
The best translation of Faust available, this volume provides the original German text and its English counterpart on facing pages. Walter Kaufmann’s translation conveys the poetic beauty and rhythm as well as the complex depth of Goethe’s language. Includes Part One and selections from Part Two.
7. Faust: A Tragedy (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Published at: W. W. Norton & Company; Second edition (November 5, 1998)
ISBN: 978-0393972825
Walter Arndt’s translation of Faust reproduces the sense of the German original and Goethe’s enormously varied metrics and rhyme schemes. This edition presents Parts I and II complete. Cyrus Hamlin provides essential supporting material for this difficult text, and his Interpretive Notes have been expanded and reset in larger, easy-to-read type.
“Comments by Contemporaries” includes short pieces by Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. “Modern Criticism”-comprised of ten essays newly added to the Second Edition-presents the perspectives of Stuart Atkins, Jaroslav Pelikan, Benjamin Bennett, Franco Moretti, Friedrich A.Kittler, Neil M.
Flax, Marc Shell, Jane Brown, Hans Rudolf Vaget, and Marshall Berman. A Selected Bibliography is included.
8. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays
Author: by Christa Wolf
Published at: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2nd Printing edition (May 1, 1988)
ISBN: 978-0374519049
In this volume, the distinguished East German writer Christa Wolf retells the story of the fall of Troy, but from the point of view of the woman whose visionary powers earned her contempt and scorn. Written as a result of the author’s Greek travels and studies, Cassandra speaks to us in a pressing monologue whose inner focal points are patriarchy and war.
In the four accompanying pieces, which take the form of travel reports, journal entries, and a letter, Wolf describes the novel’s genesis. Incisive and intelligent, the entire volume represents an urgent call to examine the past in order to insure a future.
9. Heimskringla: or, The Lives of the Norse Kings
Author: by Snorre Sturlason
Published at: Dover Publications; Reprint edition (May 1, 1990)
ISBN: 978-0486263663
Great classic by Icelandic poet/chieftain chronicles the reigns of 16 high kings descended from the warrior-wizard god Odin. Major section on 15-year reign of Olav II Haraldson, patron saint of Norway. Based on earlier histories, oral traditions, plus new material by author, all presented with intelligence, warmth and objectivity.
Over 130 illustrations and 5 maps.
10. A Doll's House and Other Plays (Penguin Classics)
Author: by Henrik Ibsen
Published at: Penguin Classics (September 13, 2016)
ISBN: 978-0141194561
Four of Ibsen’s most important plays in superb modern translations, part of the new Penguin Ibsen series. With her assertion that she is first and foremost a human being, rather than a wife, mother or fragile doll, Nora Helmer sent shockwaves throughout Europe when she appeared in Henrik Ibsen’s greatest and most famous play, A Doll’s House.
Ibsen’s follow-up, Ghosts, was no less radical, with its unrelenting investigation into religious hypocrisy, family secrets, and sexual double-dealing. These two masterpieces are accompanied here by The Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People, both exploring the tensions and dark compromises at the heart of society.
11. Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
Author: by Rüdiger Safranski
Published at: Liveright; Reprint edition (December 4, 2018)
ISBN: 978-1631494895
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus ReviewsThis splendid biography (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age.
A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832), a remarkably prolific poet, playwright, novelist, andas Rdiger Safranksi emphasizesa statesman and naturalist, first awakened not only a burgeoning German nation but the European continent with his electrifying novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Safranski has scoured Goethe’s entire oeuvre, relying exclusively on primary sources, including his correspondence with contemporaries, to produce a fresh and authentic (Economist) portrait of the avatar of the Romantic era. Skillfully blending artistic analysis with swift, sharp renderings of the great political and intellectual figures Goethe encountered, [Safranski’s] portrait of the prolific genius leaves the reader with lasting awe, even envy of a monumental legacy (The New Yorker).
12. The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki (Penguin Classics)
Author: by Jesse L. Byock
Published at: Penguin Classics; Penguin Classics edition (February 1, 1999)
ISBN: 978-0140435931
Composed in medieval Iceland, Hrolf’s Saga is one of the greatest of all mythic-legendary sagas, relating half-fantastical events that were said to have occurred in fifth-century Denmark. It tells of the exploits of King Hrolf and of his famous champions, including Bodvar Bjarki, the ‘bear-warrior’: a powerful figure whose might and bear-like nature are inspired by the same legendary heritage as Beowulf.
Depicting a world of wizards, sorceresses and ‘berserker’ fighters – originally members of a cult of Odin – this is a compelling tale of ancient magic. A work of timeless power and beauty, it offers both a treasury of Icelandic prose and a masterful gathering of epic, cultic memory, traditional folk tale and myths from the Viking age and far earlier.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
13. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs
Author: by Gilles Deleuze
Published at: Zone Books; Reprint edition (March 19, 1991)
ISBN: 978-0942299557
In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze’s essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch’s “peculiar way of ‘desexualizing’ love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity.” He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them – Masoch and Sade – lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part.
Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch’s novels was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death.
14. Death in Venice (A Norton Critical Edition)
Author: by Thomas Mann
Published at: W. W. Norton & Company; First edition (June 17, 1994)
ISBN: 978-0393960136
Thomas Mann is widely acknowledged as the greatest German novelist of this century. His 1912 novella Death in Venice is the most frequently read example of Mann’s early work. Clayton Koelb’s masterful translation improves upon its predecessors in two ways: it renders Mann into American (not British) English, and it remains true to Mann’s original text without sacrificing fluency.
For American readers, this is the translation of choice. “Backgrounds and Contexts” includes Mann’s working notes, which allow students to observe the author’s creative process. The notes are available here for the first time in English. Illuminating selections from Mann’s essays and letters are also reprinted, as are period maps of Munich, Venice, and the Lido.
“Criticism” includes six essaysby Andre von Gronicka, Manfred Dierks, T.J. Reed, Dorrit Cohn, David Luke, and Robert Tobinsure to stimulate classroom discussion. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
