Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa

Name: Literary Politics of Mitteleuropa
Brand: Camden House
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

By Yvonne Zivkovic

0 - Default Title

Description

The German term Mitteleuropa, or Central Europe, was never just a geographical concept: it connoted extending German influence to the east. In the 1980s, a number of eastern European dissident writers, including Konrád, Milosz, and Kundera, defiantly revived the concept to counter what they saw as a Cold War memory vacuum and to emphasize their alignment with the multiethnic and multilingual legacy of the Habsburg Empire, giving rise to a protractedpublic debate. Their move, however, had been anticipated in postwar literary works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Handke, and Christoph Ransmayr in Austria and Danilo Kis, Aleksandar Tisma, and Dubravka Ugresic in Yugoslavia, who questioned notions of geographic identity and national allegiance by imagining Mitteleuropa as a cultural space between nostalgia and totalitarianism. Yvonne Zivkovic draws on theories of space and memory to show how this alternate memory discourse emerged and that it reveals deep ties between the Second Austrian Republic and the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. The writers discussed address the major themes of the 1980s debate - traumatic memory, geographic displacement, and transnationalism - but also share a literary aesthetics that privileges the intersections of prose fiction and the essay, the literary fragment, and intertextuality. Zivkovic's book shows the persistence of Mitteleuropa as a literary network and as a cultural collective defined by political debate and civic values, countering public tendencies of memory manipulation.

Product details

Number of Pages:: 330
Release Date:: 2021-03-15
Publication Date:: 2021-03-19
Publisher:: Camden House
Languages:: Original: English
ISBN10:: 1640140883
ISBN13:: 9781640140882
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:: [email protected]
Weight:: 630 g
Height:: 15.7 cm
Width:: 23.5 cm
Thickness:: 2.2 cm

Buy on Amazon

Currently sold out

Add to Wishlist