Description:
"This book will have a major impact not just on scholarship on Wagner and Lang, or even in the areas of music and film; I am confident that it will also produce a new reflection on the relationship between close readings of individual cultural objects and broader thinking on issues such as German national identity and self-understanding."--Michael W. Jennings, Princeton University
Review Quotes: "This is a smart and thoroughly absorbing book. Its focus is not on a single genre but on the uses that have been made of the Nibelung legend to help shape German national and cultural identity.... A subtly argued study of how the works under consideration 'render their politics in an aesthetic register.'"---Herbert Lindenberger, Quarterly Journal of the Modern Language Association