Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824872083
- eISBN:
- 9780824876852
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824872083.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and ...
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The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and translations, exhibitions, graphic novels, radio plays, and movies inspired by his life and work, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Maria Schrader’s Vor der Morgenröte. At the same heated debates about the writer’s literary merit flared up again. This introduction provides an overview of the international reception history of Zweig, whose works have been translated into more than sixty languages since the 1920s, while causing relentless aversion and controversy among scholars and critics. This chapter also explains why the Chinese reception with its wealth of unexplored material spanning almost the whole twentieth century serves as the ideal case study not only to re-read Zweig’s work but also to rethink our understanding of cross-cultural literary connections as complex “global systems of cultural transfer.”Less
The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and translations, exhibitions, graphic novels, radio plays, and movies inspired by his life and work, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Maria Schrader’s Vor der Morgenröte. At the same heated debates about the writer’s literary merit flared up again. This introduction provides an overview of the international reception history of Zweig, whose works have been translated into more than sixty languages since the 1920s, while causing relentless aversion and controversy among scholars and critics. This chapter also explains why the Chinese reception with its wealth of unexplored material spanning almost the whole twentieth century serves as the ideal case study not only to re-read Zweig’s work but also to rethink our understanding of cross-cultural literary connections as complex “global systems of cultural transfer.”
Ritchie Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199248889
- eISBN:
- 9780191697784
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248889.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews were conspicuously associated with liberalism, the political expression of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Earlier in the century, liberalism implied the ...
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Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews were conspicuously associated with liberalism, the political expression of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Earlier in the century, liberalism implied the search for universal human rights. Despite much diversity, liberals broadly agreed in desiring constitutional government with a large measure of popular participation; with freedom of expression, abolition of censorship and national unity as a means of evading the oppressive power of the German princes. This chapter focuses on varieties of nineteenth-century liberalism with which Jews were identified, and examines how three Viennese writers, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Sigmund Freud, exposed the limitations of the enlightened liberalism to which they were vitally attached.Less
Throughout the nineteenth century, Jews were conspicuously associated with liberalism, the political expression of the aspirations of the Enlightenment. Earlier in the century, liberalism implied the search for universal human rights. Despite much diversity, liberals broadly agreed in desiring constitutional government with a large measure of popular participation; with freedom of expression, abolition of censorship and national unity as a means of evading the oppressive power of the German princes. This chapter focuses on varieties of nineteenth-century liberalism with which Jews were identified, and examines how three Viennese writers, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, and Sigmund Freud, exposed the limitations of the enlightened liberalism to which they were vitally attached.
Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824872083
- eISBN:
- 9780824876852
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824872083.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
How can one author be among the most bitterly rejected writers in one cultural context, while being one of the most celebrated in another? For decades, the works of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan ...
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How can one author be among the most bitterly rejected writers in one cultural context, while being one of the most celebrated in another? For decades, the works of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) have been fiercely attacked by critics and scholars in Europe and North America who questioned their literary value and naïve Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, such as in China, Zweig’s works have enjoyed not only continued admiration but also truly exceptional influence, popularity, and even canonical status. China’s Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success story of Zweig’s novellas in China, from the first translations in the 1920s, shortly after the collapse of the Chinese Empire, through the Mao era to the contemporary People’s Republic. Extensive research in China has unearthed a wealth of hitherto unexplored Chinese-language sources which evidence that Zweig has been read in an entirely different way there. Traversing a truly global system of cultural transfer and several intermediary spaces, Zweig’s works have been selected and employed for very different literary and ideological purposes throughout turbulent times in China. Declared to be a powerful critic of bourgeois society, the Chinese way of reading Zweig reveals important new perspectives on one of the most successful and, at the same time, most misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century.Less
How can one author be among the most bitterly rejected writers in one cultural context, while being one of the most celebrated in another? For decades, the works of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) have been fiercely attacked by critics and scholars in Europe and North America who questioned their literary value and naïve Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, such as in China, Zweig’s works have enjoyed not only continued admiration but also truly exceptional influence, popularity, and even canonical status. China’s Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success story of Zweig’s novellas in China, from the first translations in the 1920s, shortly after the collapse of the Chinese Empire, through the Mao era to the contemporary People’s Republic. Extensive research in China has unearthed a wealth of hitherto unexplored Chinese-language sources which evidence that Zweig has been read in an entirely different way there. Traversing a truly global system of cultural transfer and several intermediary spaces, Zweig’s works have been selected and employed for very different literary and ideological purposes throughout turbulent times in China. Declared to be a powerful critic of bourgeois society, the Chinese way of reading Zweig reveals important new perspectives on one of the most successful and, at the same time, most misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety ...
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This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.Less
This chapter examines the converse displacement to that considered in Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, looking instead at cases where fiction‐writers colonize the forms of life‐writing, producing a variety of fake diaries, journals, biographies, and autobiographies. It takes a different approach to most of the other chapters, consisting of brief accounts of many works rather than sustained readings of a few. A taxonomy of modern engagements with life‐writing is proposed. The chapter moves on to discuss Galton's notion of ‘composite portraiture’ as a way of thinking about the surprisingly pervasive form of the portrait‐collection. The main examples are from Ford, Stefan Zweig, George Eliot, Hesketh Pearson, Gertrude Stein, Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons; Isherwood and Joyce's Dubliners also figure. Where Chapters 3 and Chapter 4 focused on books with a single central subjectivity, this chapter looks at texts of multiple subjectivities. It concludes with a discussion of the argument that multiple works — an entire oeuvre — should be read as autobiography.
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199604128
- eISBN:
- 9780191729362
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604128.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The exoticization of places is no more evident than in the case of European locales symbolically rendered mysterious, desirous, and threatening, as occurs in the case of Venice and the Swiss Alps, ...
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The exoticization of places is no more evident than in the case of European locales symbolically rendered mysterious, desirous, and threatening, as occurs in the case of Venice and the Swiss Alps, respectively, in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg. What these central Mann texts share in common with Zweig’s novella Der Amokläufer is the coupling of the exotic topography with both erotic desire and infection illness. This chapter shows thematically how the infectious-erotic topography, in which protagonists experience a moral downfall or loss of rationality, situates a critique of the self-certain and usually dominant European subject in the face of the foreign other. This chapter further outlines in theoretical terms the ways in which usually familiar or ordinary places can be symbolically exoticized by their association with eros and infection.Less
The exoticization of places is no more evident than in the case of European locales symbolically rendered mysterious, desirous, and threatening, as occurs in the case of Venice and the Swiss Alps, respectively, in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg. What these central Mann texts share in common with Zweig’s novella Der Amokläufer is the coupling of the exotic topography with both erotic desire and infection illness. This chapter shows thematically how the infectious-erotic topography, in which protagonists experience a moral downfall or loss of rationality, situates a critique of the self-certain and usually dominant European subject in the face of the foreign other. This chapter further outlines in theoretical terms the ways in which usually familiar or ordinary places can be symbolically exoticized by their association with eros and infection.
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199604128
- eISBN:
- 9780191729362
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199604128.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the ...
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The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the European self and the familiar world which it ordinarily inhabits. The observation, imagination, or appreciation of exotic foreign topographies in works by Hofmannsthal, Hesse, Dauthendey, Mann, Zweig, Kafka, Musil, Benn, Kubin, and Brecht, provokes critical self-reflection about modern European forms of consciousness. The theoretical context for this critical self-reflection includes some of the major thinkers of German modernity, including Simmel, Weber, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Worringer, and Freud. Revealed are radically different possibilities for understanding and for living life, recognition of the precariousness of the familiar world. These works testify to the power and relevance of imagination, of cultural memory and expectation, of history, emotion, and the aesthetic sensibility in our experience of the world as a shifting symbolic topography.Less
The exploration and imagination of exotic spaces allows authors not only to expand the topography of the modern literary imagination, but also to examine and contest the modern understanding of the European self and the familiar world which it ordinarily inhabits. The observation, imagination, or appreciation of exotic foreign topographies in works by Hofmannsthal, Hesse, Dauthendey, Mann, Zweig, Kafka, Musil, Benn, Kubin, and Brecht, provokes critical self-reflection about modern European forms of consciousness. The theoretical context for this critical self-reflection includes some of the major thinkers of German modernity, including Simmel, Weber, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Worringer, and Freud. Revealed are radically different possibilities for understanding and for living life, recognition of the precariousness of the familiar world. These works testify to the power and relevance of imagination, of cultural memory and expectation, of history, emotion, and the aesthetic sensibility in our experience of the world as a shifting symbolic topography.
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226886015
- eISBN:
- 9780226886039
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226886039.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
This chapter discusses conceptions of short and shortest times associated with the Greek gods Chronos and Kairos, and through the works of Friedrich Schiller, Stefan Zweig, and Èmile Zola.
This chapter discusses conceptions of short and shortest times associated with the Greek gods Chronos and Kairos, and through the works of Friedrich Schiller, Stefan Zweig, and Èmile Zola.
Ben Hutchinson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198767695
- eISBN:
- 9780191821578
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198767695.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 ...
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The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 focuses on how the key terms Epigonentum, Fin de siècle, and Dekadenz express variations on lateness in the Viennese literature of the latenineteenth century. Focusing in particular on essays and poems by figures such as Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as on cultural criticism by the likes of Carl Spitteler, Max Nordau, and Otto Weininger, the chapter explores the extent to which Viennese modernity is predicated on a sense of arriving too late, after the perceived high point of European culture. Hermann Broch’s era-defining cliché ‘the Gay Apocalypse’ captures the Dionysian duality at the heart of the period: modernity is understood to be dying, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.Less
The Wiener Moderne has long been established as a pivotal moment in the development of modernity, and it plays an important role in the European narrative of constructions of lateness. Chapter 11 focuses on how the key terms Epigonentum, Fin de siècle, and Dekadenz express variations on lateness in the Viennese literature of the latenineteenth century. Focusing in particular on essays and poems by figures such as Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as on cultural criticism by the likes of Carl Spitteler, Max Nordau, and Otto Weininger, the chapter explores the extent to which Viennese modernity is predicated on a sense of arriving too late, after the perceived high point of European culture. Hermann Broch’s era-defining cliché ‘the Gay Apocalypse’ captures the Dionysian duality at the heart of the period: modernity is understood to be dying, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.
