Judith Ryan Book order (chronological)

'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.

For the Aboriginals of Australia, bark painting has long been part of a communications concept where people gather for ceremonies, revelation and rites of passage. Bark is the surface plane of the deep volume of ancestral knowledge outsiders can glimpse but never fully understand. Yet as art and design and with artists' new visual metaphors, the art has a tremendous power. This ancient form made modern blends sacred geometry and cosmic ideas with the concrete and is being avidly collected in the international fine art market. (National Gallery of Victoria)

Judith Ryan traces Rilke's development from aestheticism to modernism, paying special attention to the way his work engages with other poetry and the visual arts. Taking a skeptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a solitary genius, Ryan shows how deeply his writing is embedded in the culture of its day. Rilke is now the most widely-read and influential German-language poet, and this study is full of surprising discoveries about his innovative and often profoundly moving poems.