Paul Goetsch Books

This volume brings together fourteen German and English articles, some previously published, others printed here for the first time. All the studies focus on motifs and themes in modern British and American poetry and examine how these textual elements are employed. They shed light on the aesthetic and interpretative choices made by individual writers, describe the authors’ debt to, and criticism of, tradition, and demonstrate the significance of motifs and themes in the history of ideas and literature. The ancient heritage is represented by essays on Prometheus, Orpheus, Circe and the sirens, the Christian tradition by an article on the church motif. The poets’ response to public motifs and themes is illustrated by studies of city poetry and the urban crowd, the fortunes of the English country house, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the Gulf War. The final section deals with poems on poetry and discusses problems of composition and inspiration (Thomas Hardy), writers’ attitude towards museums, and their handling of the motif of the blank page.

This historically oriented study focuses on interactions between the oral and the written in nineteenth century English fiction. It examines orality and literacy events such as storytelling and reading aloud and describes the functions of oral traditions in historical, regional, and other novels. It is chiefly interested in writers’ evaluations of tensions and conflicts between oral and written discourses and cultures.

As representatives of the other, monsters express anxieties, fears, and wishes with regard to human self-definitions and relationships. They also articulate problems of modernization and the machine age and take on additional functions in various discourses. This historically oriented study examines the uses and functions of traditional and newly invented monsters in Romantic, Victorian, and early-modernist literature.

Als ein 'Schlüsselmythos der Neuzeit' (Watt) erfreut sich die Faust- Geschichte im englischen Sprachraum großer Beliebtheit. Neben dem Volksbuch und Marlowes Doctor Faustus haben verschiedene Prätexte die englische und amerikanische Entwicklung beeinflusst, vor allem Goethes Faust, Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, Spenglers Der Untergang des Abendlandes und Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus. Die vorliegende Untersuchung interessiert sich weniger für das einzelne Werk in seiner Abhängigkeit von Prätexten als für seine Stellung und seine historischen Funktionen in der Entwicklung der Faust-Mythe.