Imperial Fictions: German Literature Before and Beyond the Nation-State

Description

Imperial Fictions explores ways in which writers from late antiquity to the present have imagined communities before and beyond the nation-state. It takes as its point of departure challenges to the discrete nation-state posed by globalization, migration, and European integration today, but then circles back to the beginnings of European history after the fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike nationalist literary historians of the nineteenth century, who sought the tribal roots of an allegedly homogeneous people, this study finds a distant mirror of analogous processes today in the fluid mixtures and movements of peoples. Imperial Fictions argues that it is time to stop thinking about today’s multicultural present as a deviation from a culturally monolithic past. We should rather consider the various permutations of “German” identities that have been negotiated within local and imperial contexts from the early Middle Ages to the present. Contents......Page 10 1. Introduction......Page 14 2. National Origins and the Imperial Past......Page 28 3. German Literary History and the Medieval Renaissance......Page 46 4. Silesian Patriots and Imperial Subjects......Page 68 5. Goethe and the End of the Holy Roman Empire......Page 94 6. Romantic Nationalism and Imperial Nostalgia......Page 132 7. Worldly Provincialism in Imperial Germany......Page 156 8. Collapsing Empires and Nascent Nations......Page 190 9. Revisiting the Heimat after the Third Reich......Page 228 10. Popular Fiction and the Imperial Past......Page 250 11. Conclusion: National Literature in an Era of World Literature......Page 268 Notes......Page 278 Works Cited......Page 306 Index......Page 334