Description: Traces a history of the sometimes fraught relationship between German law and literature in the modern period, from Grimm to Schmitt.
Brief description:
Thomas O. Beebee is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University, USA. He is the author of Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002 (Oxford University Press, 2008), Epistolary Fiction in Europe
(Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (Penn State Press, 1994) and Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction (Penn State Press, 1990).
Review Quotes: "Kafka, Benjamin, Schmitt-that German-speaking writers and thinkers of the early 20th century are obsessed with 'the law' is well-known. Citation and Precedent widens our historical and conceptual perspective. Beebee reconstructs not only a dense intertextual network of law, literature, and philosophy that pervades German culture from Kant to Peter Weiss; he also shows that these crossings and borrowings are driven by the dream, or the nightmare, of a 'culture' capable of uniting law and life, codified norm and everyday reality. This is an excellent book." -- Andreas Gailus, Associate Professor of German, University of Michigan, USA
Monatshefte