Motley Stones

Motley Stones PDF Author: Adalbert Stifter
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681375206
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The first complete English translation of the nineteenth-century Austrian innovator's evocative, elemental cycle of novellas. For Kafka he was “my fat brother”; Thomas Mann called him “one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature.” Often misunderstood as an idyllic poet of “beetles and buttercups,” the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter can now be seen as a radical experimenter with narrative and a forerunner of nature writing’s darker currents. One of his best-known works, the novella cycle Motley Stones now appears in its first complete English translation, a rendition that respects the bracing strangeness of the original. In six thematically linked novellas, including the beloved classic “Rock Crystal,” human dramas play out amid the natural cycles of the Alps or the urban rhythms of Vienna—environments so keenly observed that they emerge as the tales’ most indomitable protagonists. Stifter’s human characters are equally haunting—children braving perils, eccentrics and loners harboring enigmatic torments. “We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race,” Stifter famously wrote. What he glimpsed, more often than not, was the abyss that lies behind the idyll. The tension between his humane sensitivity and his dark visions is what lends his writing its heartbreaking power.

Rock Crystal

Rock Crystal PDF Author: Adalbert Stifter
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681370530
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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Book Description
Seemingly the simplest of stories—a passing anecdote of village life— Rock Crystal opens up into a tale of almost unendurable suspense. This jewel-like novella by the writer that Thomas Mann praised as "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature" is among the most unusual, moving, and memorable of Christmas stories. Two children—Conrad and his little sister, Sanna—set out from their village high up in the Alps to visit their grandparents in the neighboring valley. It is the day before Christmas but the weather is mild, though of course night falls early in December and the children are warned not to linger. The grandparents welcome the children with presents and pack them off with kisses. Then snow begins to fall, ever more thickly and steadily. Undaunted, the children press on, only to take a wrong turn. The snow rises higher and higher, time passes: it is deep night when the sky clears and Conrad and Sanna discover themselves out on a glacier, terrifying and beautiful, the heart of the void. Adalbert Stifter's rapt and enigmatic tale, beautifully translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, explores what can be found between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—or on any night of the year.

The Village on the Heath

The Village on the Heath PDF Author: Adalbert Stifter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description


Narratives Unsettled

Narratives Unsettled PDF Author: Samuel Frederick
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810128179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Narratives Unsettled argues by way of close readings of three very different German-language writers that only if we conceive of narrativity unburdened by plot can we properly account for radical forms of digression.

At the Limit of the Obscene

At the Limit of the Obscene PDF Author: Erica Weitzman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810143186
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

Indian Summer

Indian Summer PDF Author: Adalbert Stifter
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
ISBN: 9783906763736
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Brigitta and Other Tales

Brigitta and Other Tales PDF Author: Adalbert Stifter
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780140446302
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Each of these four stories is set in a recognisable world depicted with a measured realism. But once the reader has learned to look beneath the calm, apparently seamless surface of the narrative, and in Stifter's words, 'to see with an eye of the heart', strange tensions are revealed.

Witiko

Witiko PDF Author: Adalbert Stifter
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783039109517
Category : Bohemia (Czech Republic)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Set around the events of the succession struggle of 1142 in medieval Bohemia the main character, Witiko, the traditional founder of the Rosenberg Family, searches for the Right, finds it and his beloved, while never losing touch with the common folk. His quest is amid the panoramic backdrop of national Bohemian politics and history, with his fate paralleling that of the acknowledged rightful duke, Wladislaw, who is also seeking the path of justice. Witiko is considered one of the most significant German historical novels of the Nineteenth Century.

Vienna Tales

Vienna Tales PDF Author: Helen Constantine
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199669791
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Seventeen stories from one of Europe's most enchanting cities.

Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting

Museums of the Mind: German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047909
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description