Dreaming in Books:
The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age
Author: Andrew Piper
This book is about the remarkable social investment that was made in books, both materially and imaginatively, at the turn of the nineteenth century across Europe and North America. As books streamed in ever greater numbers from publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in facilitating readers’ adaptation to this increasingly international and overflowing bookish environment. Learning how to use and to want books did not simply occur through the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible. The making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well.
Examining novels, critical and collected editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book's many identities at the turn of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Dreaming in Books revises our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book.
Cult of the Will:
Nervousness and German Modernity
Author: Michael Cowan
Cult of the Will is the first comprehensive study of modernity’s preoccupation with willpower. From Nietzsche’s “will to power” to the fantasy of a “triumph of the will” under Nazism, the will—its pathologies and potential cures—was a topic of urgent debates in European modernity.
In this study, Michael Cowan examines the emergence of “will therapy” and its impact on arts and culture in Germany after 1900. The book’s five chapters lead readers through cross sections of modern German cultural history, including not only literature and aesthetics but also self-help medicine, economics, body culture, and pedagogy. Modernity’s fixation on willpower helped prepare the way for fascism, but this trajectory is not Cowan’s main concern. His focus falls rather on more widespread “technologies of the self” and their role in the effort to reimagine agency for a modern subject caught up in increasingly complex systemic networks.
The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof
Ulrike Meinhof Edited by Karin Bauer
Preface by Elfriede Jelinek
Afterword by Bettina Röhl
Translated by Luise von Flotow
No other figure embodies revolutionary politics, radical chic, and the promises and failures of the New Left quite like Ulrike Meinhof (1934-76). In the 1960s, she was known in Europe as a journalist and public intellectual, leading an exciting life in Hamburg’s high society with her publisher husband and twin daughters. Ten years later, Meinhof gave up her bourgeois existence to form, with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, the Red Army Faction (RAF). Also called the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the group was notorious for its politically motivated acts of violence, including bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies, and shootouts with police.
What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? Meinhof, who spent the 1960s writing a column for the popular leftist magazine konkret, began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof’s 1960s columns published in konkret show a woman in transition, reflecting upon the major political events and social currents of her time. An essay by Karin Bauer contextualizes Meinhof’s writings and mesmerizing life story within the political developments of the German Left. Bauer also explores Meinhof’s afterlife and asks why Meinhof’s ghost still haunts us today.
A relentless critic of her mother and of the Left, author and journalist Bettina Röhl, one of Meinhof’s daughters, contributes an afterword that aims to tear down Meinhof’s iconic status. Noting the increasingly desperate tone of Meinhof’s writing, Nobel Prize Laureate Elfriede Jelinek reflects in her foreword on Germany’s missed opportunity to learn from Meinhof’s writings.