englischIn the decades around 1900, “Weltanschauungsliteratur” (ideological literature) boomed. These texts, which oscillate between science and literature, promise a meaningful explanation of the world in times of crisis. Three great novels of German modernist literature – Thomas Mann's Zauberberg, [...]

englischThis first comprehensive study of heroism and the heroic in “Doctor Who” (1963-2020) uses one of Britain’s longest-running TV series to access the changing state of the nation and its collective emotions since the early Sixties. The analysis of two decade-spanning processes of heroization [...]

englischHow much tradition is there in the avant-garde? Is everything that is claimed to be new really new? Literary Expressionism (the most important avant-garde movement of Classical Modernism), which was and still is generally considered to be the epoch of "broken forms", claimed this for itself: [...]

englischDespite its undisputed place in the canon of the avant-garde, Oswald Wiener's „die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman“ remains, half a century after its publication, a riddle in need of interpretation. As part of his work on the first complete translation of the „verbesserung“ (into [...]

englischFor decades, the Maoist New People's Army in the Philippines has been fighting exploitation and poverty. In the 1980s, several Catholic priests joined and shaped it. One faction pursued national revolution, while another emphasized the preservation of indigenous culture. Conrado Balweg [...]

englischHow does literature think about lived time? One of the central patterns of making sense of lived (and narrated) time is the category of fate, which has an ambiguous connection to the concept of chance. In contemporary literature, fate only seems to have become obsolete. Instead, the emphasis [...]