Digital Commons Network^™

Reviews Of Recent Publications

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Julian W. Connolly, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Thomas Seifrid

Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis, eds. National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction. Keith Livers

Sander L. Gilman. Franz Kafka. Esther K. Bauer

Jill Robbins, ed. P/herversions: Critical Studies of Ana Rossetti. Roberta Johnson

Jennifer Warburton. John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds. John Fowles. The Journals, Vol. I. Ed. Charles Drazin Gerd Bayer

Dead Center: Berlin, The Postmodern Gothic, And Norman Ohler's Mitte, Steffen H. Hantke

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Cultural critics often frame present-day Berlin as a space of historical discontinuities, a nexus of modernity and postmodernity that, in its orientation toward the future, represents post-reunification Germany in all its complexity. However, this framing tends to suppress Gothic imagery, of which traces can be found in the critical discourse on the city. Recuperating such Gothic tropes from critical discourse, and then consciously and strategically re-deploying them, can be a valuable strategy for opening up new venues of thinking about the lingering presence of the past, the high cost of modernization, and the uncanny emotional and affective dimensions of urban …

Expressionism, Futurism, And The Dream Of Mass Democracy, Douglas Brent Mcbride

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay throws new light on a radical tendency in cultural modernism by analyzing the role of a single metaphor—the figure of politics as a stage—in political debates among German Expressionists and Italian Futurists before World War I. As the essay argues, this trope was used to critique liberalism's limited notion of popular rule and envision how disenfranchised masses might develop the political subjectivity needed to create a truly mass democracy. While the essay demonstrates that Futurists and Expressionists failed to develop a clear vision of what form mass democracy might take, it concludes that they agreed on one point. …