Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s
2002; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 97; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3736982
ISSN2222-4319
AutoresSusanne Stark, Patrick Bridgwater,
Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoBridgwater, Patrick. Anglo-German Interactions in Literature of 1890s. Oxford: Legends, 1999. xii + 274 pp. 227.50. Out of long experience and profound understanding of era, Patrick Bridgwater has composed comprehensive account of literary relations between fin-de-siecle Britain and Germany/Austria, when Pre-Raphaelites and first generation of modernists rediscovered paganism while Germans awakened to English Romanticism and boldness of artistic autonomy and immoralism -accompanied, to be sure, as Bridgwater repeatedly reminds us, by obbligato of Max Nordau's ominous excoriation of cultural Entartung. The book deals in discriminating detail with aesthetic Germanism of the tutelary spirit of these pages, Walter Pater (3); elaborate and Austrian admiration for somewhat Germanophobic Oscar Wilde, regarded as martyr to English philistinism; belated reception of Keats as a pure poet, poet's poet (123) in Germany and Austria; varying interests of Meredith, Rossetti, Dowson, and Swinburne, along with their varying receptions by such as George and Hofmannsthal; George Moore's partly pretended discipleship to Schopenhauer (a rather long chapter for reader not much interested in Moore); and Pater's often highlighted but superficial affinity with Nietzsche, compared to Wilde's true but unconscious parallels. The most exotic part of story, filling chapters, concerns elaborate fascination with forgotten chronicle novelist Wilhelm Meinhold, whose Maria Sch.weidler, die Bernsteinhexe was translated by Sarah Austin's daughter and Heine's favorite, Lucie Duff-- Gordon, and Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe by Oscar Wilde's mother, Jane Elgee. The long-lived popularity of these books in England is phenomenal, with many sumptuous editions of Sidonia, including two Kelmscott Press editions, one on vellum (98, 100). Sidonia seems to be ancestress of any number of sadistically amoral femmes fatales in literature and art. The joke is that Gothic writer comes to be imported into eminently English genre of German horror. As far as I can see, nothing scholarly has been written about Meinhold in decades, although Yale dissertation completed by Paul Barber in 1968 included him. He belongs to under researched topic of writers whose prestige has been higher at times in countries other than their own, such as Jack London in Soviet Union, Hoffmann or Poe in France, Thornton Wilder or Charles Bukowski in Germany, Heine almost anywhere. From Bridgwater's account one might add German/Austrian reputations of Swinburne and Wilde. Bridgwater's finely discriminated analyses are profoundly concerned with relation or disjunction of and moral as it was threshed over during 1890s. …
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