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The book provides a sentence-by-sentence translation of Die Judenbuche (1842) by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, arguably one of Germany’s greatest female poets. Often thought of as a detective novel, The Jews’ Beech Tree is as much a mystery to read today as it was in 1842. Featuring the original German and the translated English side-by-side, this text also includes three critical introductions and two additional poetry translations.
In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a universal community, Almog argues, es...
In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only attacked sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also roved as far as Iceland. A substantial number of the European captives who later returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then called, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives greatly influenced the development of the modern novel and autobiography, and they also shaped European perceptions o...
Die Schwarze Spinne is a religious allegory about morals and religious living in the mid-nineteenth century, written by Jeremias Gotthelf. This work is an interlinear translation of Gotthelf's Die Schwarze Spinne with introductions to both the author and the work itself. In a small Swiss community, a baptism is the backdrop for a village elder to tell the story of his family and their life and death struggle with the devil himself. The elder relates the story of a knight and his ill treatment of the farmers of the area. The knight's inhuman demands upon the peasants bring about unforeseen consequences, which lead to the decimation of the village and, ultimately, the knight's own death. The plague released through a pact with the devil, the black spider, haunts the village for hundreds of years and must be fought with religious piety, courage, and devotion to traditional values. It is when one forgets God and his commandments that the black spider is at its most deadly. A true tale of morality written by a pastor in 1842, The Black Spider serves as a warning to those who, according to Gotthelf, go against the will of God.
Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean explores the early modern genre of European Barbary Coast captivity narratives from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. During this period, the Mediterranean Sea was the setting of large-scale corsairing that resulted in the capture or enslavement of Europeans and Americans by North African pirates, as well as of North Africans by European forces, turning the Barbary Coast into the nemesis of any who went to sea. Through a variety of specifically selected narrative case studies, this book displays the blend of both authentic eye witness accounts and literary fictions that emerged against the backdrop of the tumultuous Mediterranean Sea. A wide r...
Translation and Translating in German Studies is a collection of essays in honour of Professor Raleigh Whitinger, a well-loved scholar of German literature, an inspiring teacher, and an exceptional editor and translator. Its twenty chapters, written by Canadian and international experts explore new perspectives on translation and German studies as they inform processes of identity formation, gendered representations, visual and textual mediations, and teaching and learning practices. Translation (as a product) and translating (as a process) function both as analytical categories and as objects of analysis in literature, film, dance, architecture, history, second-language education, and study...
Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature is a collection of selected essays about the transformations of captivity experiences in major early modern texts of world literature and popular media, including works by Cervantes, de Vega, Defoe, Rousseau, and Mozart. Where most studies of Mediterranean slavery, until now, have been limited to historical and autobiographical accounts, this volume looks specifically at literary adaptations from a multicultural perspective.