The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura PDF Author: Gerald Bonaventura
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614156X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This is a strange, darkly ironic novel published under the nom de plume of Bonaventura, originally in German, in 1804. It is a true child of the romantic agony: the narrator and anti-hero, a night watchman named Kreuzgang, was once a poet. Now stripped of all Romantic illusion, he works as a watchman, which gives him a vantage on the follies of other citizens. To Kreuzgang, life is a grotesque, macabre and sordid joke sprung by a mechanical and heartless force. A cult classic in some literary circles (Gothic lit fans and specialists in German Romanticism), the book is uncannily cinematic: Every night, Kreuzgang goes on his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door where he observes a framed scene of murder, despair, theft, romance, or some other private moment. He is cynical and pessimistic and comic in a way that seems current, turning the culture of Romanticism inside out. The writing is, quite simply, brilliant. Ever since Die Nachtwachen was first published fans have speculated on who could have written it. The belief today is that the author was probably the theater director August Klingemann, who, as translator Gerald Gillespie explains, idolized Shakespeare and first staged Goethe s Faust. Certainly Klingemann would have understood the power and artifice of the framed scene. In 1972, Gerald Gillespie published a translation in the Edinburgh Bilingual Series, which was released in the States by the University of Texas Press. Our edition includes the English version only, with a new, less pedantic introduction by Gillespie and a brief afterword."

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura PDF Author: Gerald Bonaventura
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022614156X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
This is a strange, darkly ironic novel published under the nom de plume of Bonaventura, originally in German, in 1804. It is a true child of the romantic agony: the narrator and anti-hero, a night watchman named Kreuzgang, was once a poet. Now stripped of all Romantic illusion, he works as a watchman, which gives him a vantage on the follies of other citizens. To Kreuzgang, life is a grotesque, macabre and sordid joke sprung by a mechanical and heartless force. A cult classic in some literary circles (Gothic lit fans and specialists in German Romanticism), the book is uncannily cinematic: Every night, Kreuzgang goes on his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door where he observes a framed scene of murder, despair, theft, romance, or some other private moment. He is cynical and pessimistic and comic in a way that seems current, turning the culture of Romanticism inside out. The writing is, quite simply, brilliant. Ever since Die Nachtwachen was first published fans have speculated on who could have written it. The belief today is that the author was probably the theater director August Klingemann, who, as translator Gerald Gillespie explains, idolized Shakespeare and first staged Goethe s Faust. Certainly Klingemann would have understood the power and artifice of the framed scene. In 1972, Gerald Gillespie published a translation in the Edinburgh Bilingual Series, which was released in the States by the University of Texas Press. Our edition includes the English version only, with a new, less pedantic introduction by Gillespie and a brief afterword."

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022617753X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume “Bonaventura,” TheNightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett. The narrator and antihero is not Bonaventura but a night watchman named Kreuzgang, a failed poet, actor, and puppeteer who claims to be the spawn of the devil himself. As a night watchman, Kreuzgang takes voyeuristic pleasure in spying on the follies of his fellow citizens, and every night he makes his rounds and stops to peer into a window or door, where he observes framed scenes of murder, despair, theft, romance, and other private activities. In his reactions, Kreuzgang is cynical and pessimistic, yet not without humor. For him, life is a grotesque, macabre, and base joke played by a mechanical and heartless force. Since its publication, fans have speculated on the novel’s authorship, and it is now believed to be by theater director August Klingemann, who first staged Goethe’s Faust. Organized into sixteen separate nightwatches, the sordid scenes glimpsed through parted curtains, framed by door chinks, and lit by candles and shadows anticipate the cinematic. A cross between the gothic and the romantic, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is brilliant in its perverse intensity, presenting an inventory of human despair and disgust through the eyes of a bitter, sardonic watcher who draws laughter from tragedy. Translated by Gerald Gillespie, who supplies a fresh introduction, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura will be welcomed by a new generation of English-language fans eager to sample the night’s dark offerings.

The absurd in literature

The absurd in literature PDF Author: Neil Cornwell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847796575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary figures and selected works, before moving on to discuss four key writers: Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. The absurd in literature will be of compelling interest to a considerable range of students of comparative, European (including Russian and Central European) and English literatures (British Isles and American) – as well as those more concerned with theatre studies, the avant-garde and the history of ideas (including humour theory). It should also have a wide appeal to the enthusiastic general reader.

A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century

A History of Nihilism in the Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Jon Stewart
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009266705
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
A rich, expansive book reaching beyond philosophy to literature and the history of ideas with strong appeal to diverse readers.

The Reception of Northrop Frye

The Reception of Northrop Frye PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487537751
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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Book Description
The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.

A New Companion to The Gothic

A New Companion to The Gothic PDF Author: David Punter
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119062500
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 578

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Book Description
The thoroughly expanded and updated New Companion to the Gothic, provides a series of stimulating insights into Gothic writing, its history and genealogy. The addition of 12 new essays and a section on ‘Global Gothic’ reflects the direction Gothic criticism has taken over the last decade. Many of the original essays have been revised to reflect current debates Offers comprehensive coverage of criticism of the Gothic and of the various theoretical approaches it has inspired and spawned Features important and original essays by leading scholars in the field The editor is widely recognized as the founder of modern criticism of the Gothic

Ribbon of Darkness

Ribbon of Darkness PDF Author: Barbara Maria Stafford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663051X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline’s parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into—and clarifications of—current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the “veiled behavior of matter,” bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.

The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature

The Gothic-Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature PDF Author: Cornwell
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004652949
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
From the contents: From Pantheon to Pandemonium (Richard Peace). - Karamzin's Gothic tale: The Island of Bornholm (Derek Offord). - Alessandra TOSI: At the origins of the Russian Gothic novel: Nikolai Gnedich's Don Corrado de Gerrera (1803) (Alessandra Tosi). - Does Russian Gothic verse exist? The Case of Vasilii Zhukovskii (Michael Pursglove). - The fantastic in Russian Romantic prose: Pushkin's The Queen of Spades (Claire Whitehead).

Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, Second Edition

Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context, Second Edition PDF Author: Gerald Gillespie
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813217881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
The original version of Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context strove to show how a kindred encyclopedic drive and sacramental sense informed their responses to the epochal trauma, yielding three distinct and monumental visions of the human estate by the 1920s.

A Companion to European Romanticism

A Companion to European Romanticism PDF Author: Michael Ferber
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405154535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
This companion is the first book of its kind to focus on the whole of European Romanticism. Describes the way in which the Romantic Movement swept across Europe in the early nineteenth century. Covers the national literatures of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and Spain. Addresses common themes that cross national borders, such as orientalism, Napoleon, night, nature, and the prestige of the fragment. Includes cross-disciplinary essays on literature and music, literature and painting, and the general system of Romantic arts. Features 35 essays in all, from leading scholars in America, Australia, Britain, France, Italy, and Switzerland.