The Stories of Heinrich Von Kleist

Fictions of Security
Erscheinungsjahr 2001
ISBN: 978-1-57113-227-7
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 1, 256 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 526 g

Reihe: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

New and insightful interpretations of the controversial stories of Heinrich von Kleist.

The fascinating and controversial German writer of dramas and novellas Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is one of the most interesting objects of analysis for scholars of German literature even today, nearly two centuries after hisdeath by suicide. In recent years, disagreements among Kleist scholars have been so extreme that some have suggested that his work subverts the very process of interpretation. Seán Allan challenges this view and the related one of Kleist as a profound pessimist. He argues that the focus on Kleist's uninterpretability has obscured important elements of social criticism present in his 'moral stories.' To correct the widely-held view of Kleist as a 'poet without a society,' Allan approaches the stories via investigation of four thematic clusters: justice and revenge; revolution and social change; education and the nature of evil; and art and religion. Allan holds that the perspectiveendorsed by the Kleistian narrator is designed to reflect the assumptions and prejudices of the members of the dominant class of Kleist's time (authoritarian and male-dominated as it was), and finds that by the end of the storiesit is precisely this perspective that has been profoundly called into question.

Seán Allan is lecturer in German at the University of Warwick, UK.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Allan, Seán

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction
The World of Heinrich von Kleist
Michael Kohlhaas
Der Zweikampf
Das Erdbeben in Chili
Die Verlobung in St. Domingo
Der Findling
Die Marquise von O.
Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik
Conclusion
Works Consulted

Über Autor(innen)

Allan, Seán
SEÁN ALLAN is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at the Humboldt Universität in what was then East Berlin. From 2001-2016 he worked at the University of Warwick before moving to St Andrews in 2016 as Professor of German. His main research areas regard the culture of the European Enlightenment, interdisciplinary approaches to the mediation of music and the visual arts, as well as translation and translation studies. He is the author of The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (1996) and The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Camden House, 2001). He is the co-editor of a special edition of German Life and Letters, entitled Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity (2011); the co-editor of the volumes Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics and Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2012), and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (2016); and the co-author of the monograph Unverhoffte Wirkungen: Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2014). His most recent book, Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (2019), investigates questions of intermediality and spans not only film, but also literature, music, and the visual arts in post-war cinema.