Living Streams combines terser chapters exploring key topics of the post-Renaissance era with broader chapters highlighting moments when the larger fabric of an emergent shared Western culture is woven on the international plane.
The relationship between literature and other forms of art, explored through a broad range of examples, drawn from several continents and analyzed with careful attention to their historical and generic specificity. A variety of discourses and media are considered alongside more traditional categories of art and literature.
This book focuses on the precursor role of Ludwig Tieck in the Romantic revolution in drama which is seen in his fantastic comedy Puss-in-Boots (1797), a precocious benign forerunner of theatre of the absurd. Tieck's contribution is examined in the light of key dramatists of several strands of modernism.