The annual Bithell Memorial Lecture series was inaugurated in 1975 by Professor Leonard Willougby, founding Honorary Director of the the Institute of Germanic Studies. From 1986 the Lectures have been held (and published) at two- to three-year intervals
Johann Georg Adam Forster (1754-1794) accompanied James Cook on his second voyage (1772-1775) and became a Jacobin (1792-1793). His distinctly European outlook as a cultural mediator between England, France, and Germany in scientific and political terms explains, to a large degree, the difficulties that German literary critics had in dealing with Forster’s nonfiction writing. The first part of this book relates readings – spanning from the late 1790s through 1989 – of Forster’s life and work to the development of institutionalized German studies; the second part discusses the secondary literature on individual texts by Forster guiding the reader to the most important critical analyses.
During the fifty years since the end of hostilities, European literary memories of the war have undergone considerable change, influenced by the personal experiences of writers as well as changing political, social, and cultural factors. This volume examines changing ways of remembering the war in the literatures of France, Germany, and Italy; changes in the subject of memory, and in the relations between fiction, autobiography, and documentary, with the focus being on the extent to which shared European memories of the war have been constructed.