Bøger i Companions to Contemporary German Culture serien

Reshapes DEFA cinema studies by exploring international networks, identifying lines of influence beyond national boundaries and recognizing genre qualities that surpass the temporal and spatial confines of the state.

This companion provides a comprehensive overview of German pop music from the post-war period to the present. It highlights specific German varieties of pop music within an international context with chapters on German punk, industrial music and techno.

This broad-ranging, English-language anthology introduces the renowned public intellectual Christa Wolf in her times and for today. Scholars from across the globe explore the East German author¿s variously received oeuvre and her influence in world literature. From new perspectives, they highlight topics such as subjective authenticity, agency, gender, environmentalism, geopolitics, war, and memory, and Wolf¿s work on film.

Durs Grünbein is the most significant poet and essayist in German today. No other modern German poet has written from such an emphatically European and global perspective, and this volume seeks to present the poet and his work to the English-speaking world in all their significance and breadth. Written by a line-up of international scholars and critics, the volume offers highly readable and wide-ranging essays on Grünbein's substantial oeuvre, complemented by specially commissioned material and an interview with the poet. It covers the German and European traditions, and engages with Grünbein's works in the context of a number of relevant topics, such as 'memory', 'urban life', 'mortality', 'love', and 'presence'; it also probes Grünbein's sustained dialogue with the natural sciences and the visual arts.

Ulrike Draesner is a prize-winning writer of novels, short stories, critical essays and poetry, and one of the foremost authors in Germany today. While a number of volumes have been published in German on her work, the current Companion offers the first volume on Draesner in English, capitalising on the interest in her work in Germany and further afield. Introducing Draesner's major novels and short stories, poetry collections and essays, as well as giving an overview of existing research focusing on migration, memory, science, gender and bodily experience, chapters by international scholars in this volume also break new ground by focussing on visual culture, poetology, nature, the posthuman and Draesner's reception of English literature and medieval culture. A comprehensive bibliography, commissioned interview and original writing by Draesner make the volume a valuable research tool for scholars and students. This will become essential reading for all those interested in Draesner, women's writing, literature and history, and contemporary German prose and poetry.

Pop literature of the 1990s enjoyed bestselling success, as well as an extensive and sometimes bluntly derogatory reception in the press. Since then, less censorious scholarship on pop has emerged to challenge its flash-in-the-pan status by situating the genre within a longer history of aesthetic practices. This volume draws on recent work and its attempts to define the genre, locate historical antecedents and assess pop's ability to challenge the status quo. Significantly, it questions the 'official story' of pop literature by looking beyond Ralf Dieter Brinkmann's works as origin to those of Jurgen Ploog, Jorg Fauser and Hadayatullah Hubsch. It also remedies the lack of attention to questions of gender in previous pop lit scholarship and demonstrates how the genre has evolved in the new millennium via expanded thematic concerns and new aesthetic approaches. Essays in the volume examine the writing of well-known, established pop authors - such as Christian Kracht, Andreas Neumeister, Joachim Lottman, Benjamin Lebert, Florian Illies, Feridun Zaimoglu and Sven Regener - as well as more recent works by Jana Hensel, Charlotte Roche, Kerstin Grether, Helene Hegemann and songwriter/poet PeterLicht.