History Of Contemporary Literature Research Articles

The stakes of “Imitation”: debating modern poetics and national identity in late ottoman literature

ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman culture witnessed a concerted effort to develop a national literature on par with modern European literature and culture. This was also the time when Ottoman intellectuals began to develop a systematic approach to literary analysis. Debates on the imitation, translation, and adaptation of Western forms were central to this period. This article examines the evolution of the concept and practice of imitation as part of these debates. This detailed analysis of the theoretical discourse surrounding the concepts of imitation and authenticity contributes to the broader field of literary theory and comparative literature. By introducing the theoretical rigor inherent in Ottoman-Turkish intellectual practice and highlighting its specific conceptual tradition, the article not only bridges the gap of non-Western critical thought in contemporary literary history, but also offers a fresh perspective on the much-debated East–West paradigms and cross-cultural approaches in literary studies and beyond.

KAPCSOLATTÖRTÉNET, KULTURÁLIS ÁTSZÖVŐDÉSEK, TRANSZNACIONÁLIS KUTATÁSOK

A vajdasági magyar irodalomkritikában, valamint a -kutatásban a kezdetek óta természetszerű volt a tágabb nyelvi és kulturális környezet iránti érdeklődés. A két világháború közötti korszak szerkesztői, műfordítói, írói a jugoszláviai irodalmak közvetítőiként működtek. E hagyomány folytatódott a titói Jugoszlávia évtizedeiben is. A szerb, horvát, szlovén irodalmak és a magyar közötti kapcsolat átjárhatóvá tételének Vajdaságban történeti hagyománya van. Talán csak a szlovákiai magyar irodalomban volt még a környező kultúrák iránti figyelem ilyen magától értetődő, Erdélyben kevésbé. Pozsonyban ugyancsak hang- súlyozták a cseh, a szlovák és a magyar kultúrák kölcsönös megismertetésének fontosságát. E missziót később a Kalligram Kiadó vállalta magára. Mifelénk a második világháború után a Híd, az Új Symposion, a Forum Könyvkiadó, szerkesztőik és a fordítók érdemei voltak kiemelkedőek. Bori Imre professzor a Magyar Tanszék hallgatói számára egyetemi tárgyként alapozta meg a magyar–délszláv irodalmi kapcsolatok ismeretét. Azonos című 1970-es, majd az Irodalmak – kölcsönhatások (1971), illetve 1987-ben megjelent kapcsolattörténeti tanulmánykötetein kívül Miroslav Krležáról (1976) és Ivo Andrićról (1992) is publikált kismonográfiákat. A vajdasági és a modern magyar irodalomtörténet kutatását tehát a szlavisztika és a kontaktológia komparatív kérdéskörével gazdagította. A littérature comparée a XX. században és az új évezred elején együtt változott a humán kutatások egyéb szakterületeivel. Konferencia-előadásom tárgyát a komparatív kutatások újabb irányai, feladatai és célkitűzései képezik.

Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present by Theodore Martin

Reviewed by: Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present by Theodore Martin Joseph Darda Theodore Martin. Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. Columbia UP, 2017. 264 pp. In 1955, the Modern Fiction Club at Purdue University founded Modern Fiction Studies to advance scholarship on modern and contemporary fiction. The founding editors sought the latest thinking on literary modernism—the first volume included essays on William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf—but they left the door open to the emerging field of contemporary literature. With New Criticism ascendant, the editors published work by formalists committed to the intrinsic features of the text, but they faced the extrinsic historical challenge of distinguishing the modern from the contemporary, of historicizing the present. From day one, the field of contemporary literature has been animated by that tension between form and history, text and context. When and what is the contemporary? Can we know it as history? What do we talk about when we talk about the contemporary? Theodore Martin's important new book Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present identifies how the meaning of the contemporary has been obscured by the rift between formalists and historicists, from the New Criticism of the 1940s to the New Historicism of the 1980s and ever since. That is because the history of the contemporary, Martin argues, surfaces in the changes and continuities of generic form. The contemporary drifts, but it also drags. Today's contemporary is different from yesterday's, but they are not wholly unrelated. Genre provides a critical apparatus for measuring the distance from yesterday to today, for identifying the unique characteristics of our contemporary but also what binds it to the past. Martin suggests that the drag of genre—what remains stable about, for example, the novel of manners or the noir film—allows us to control for the drift of the contemporary. Formulating a theory of genre is a first step toward writing a history of the present. "Genre's blend of change and continuity, of drift and drag, makes it a privileged site for exploring the process of becoming contemporary," he writes (13): "Think of it as a controlled experiment in historical emergence." The larger ambition of Martin's experiment is to reconcile history with form by writing the former through the latter. Martin is by no means the first to confront the problem of the contemporary. His study traces and synthesizes carefully observed critical genealogies of contemporary literary history and literary genre theory to conceptualize the historical present. Contemporary literary studies has long struggled with whether and how it fits into the [End Page 385] historicist paradigm that has dominated English departments since Stephen Greenblatt declared a desire to speak to the dead thirty years ago. The Post-45 collective, a group of midcareer scholars broadly interested in the institutions and sociology of writing and reading, has taken the lead in bringing historicism to bear on contemporary literary culture. But the group has, for the most part, set aside the theoretical question of what constitutes contemporary literature to get down to the business of rewriting postwar literary history. While the Post-45 collective has delivered revisionist histories of institutional creative writing, the Democratic Party, the suburbs, and the free market, it has worked around the edges of the contemporary as a critical concept. Martin looks to genre to offer a theory of the contemporary and a history of our contemporary. The status of genre fiction has changed in the twenty-first century, he observes, with literary novelists and indie filmmakers turning to genre fiction to take a measure of the present as it relates to and departs from the past. Genre is having a moment in English departments, too. Literary scholars have increasingly recognized genre as a useful indicator of how literature registers and even anticipates historical change. Martin's key insight is that this treatment of genre as a historical tool, when applied to the contemporary, can turn the present into an object of historical analysis. Contemporary Drift bridges the conversations being had by the Post-45 collective and the new genre theorists by reframing the problem...

Social and Historic Contextuality of Contemporary Albanian Literature

To reach the reader of 2018, Contemporary Albanian literature has overcome many obstacles and politics ideology. It felt violated by a certain, imposing and savage ideology. The method of socialist realism by some writers was embraced with delight and conviction, and from some others it was used for compromise to bring to light their works, which, in case of incompatibility with the relevant ideology, was banned from publishing. However, given that literature is the creation of the human spirit, it is unnatural to think that all this literature of this period has not expressed their feelings, sorrows, dreams and their love. Perhaps, we can argue with conviction, which has been a memory for the past and also a dream for the future. This literature overwhelmed the content imposed in 1945 and continued to be the most rebellious. The national liberation war was not the subject of the 1960s literature, which was more stubborn than what was written fifteen years ago, even by the same authors. Here, summed up as a great deal in the history of contemporary literature, find the first and the foremost authors of this literature, their best works, publishers, and their echoes in the language of translation.
 Key words: Literature, History, World War II, Writer, Contemporary, Education, Publisher.

L’expérience totalitaire en Europe : destruction et aliénation des individus dans l’œuvre de fiction de Katrina Kalda

La historia literaria contemporánea, relacionada con la experiencia totalitaria de los países de la Europa del Este, se manifiesta como un marco muy rico abierto al análisis de los comportamientos de los individuos sometidos a las exigencias del sistema. Partiendo de un corpus de dos novelas escritas por Katrina Kalda (1980), escritora exiliada originaria de la Europa del Este, presentaremos unas trayectorias (femeninas) ilustrativas de las consecuencias de una organización que destruye a los individuos en favor de la noción de Estado. La introversión, el silencio, la parálisis, la alienación mental y finalmente el suicidio y el exilio son la manifestación más representativa de una galería de personajes que actúan en la frontera de lo inverosímil y la insumisión. La novela, según Milan Kundera (1986; 2006), ofrece la mejor vía de expresión de una problemática existencial, la pérdida y la degradación de los valores. El autor y sus personajes oprimidos denuncian los abusos de una organización social destructiva a lo largo de varias décadas.

The Spiritual Meaning of Material Things in the Novels of Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868): A Study in Poetic Realism by Pamela S. Saur

Reviewed by: The Spiritual Meaning of Material Things in the Novels of Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868): A Study in Poetic Realism by Pamela S. Saur Matthew J. Sherman Pamela S. Saur, The Spiritual Meaning of Material Things in the Novels of Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868): A Study in Poetic Realism. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2015. 212 pp. At the center of Pamela S. Saur's monograph on the Austrian author Adalbert Stifter is an interest in "the complex ways in which abstract virtues, ideals, and spiritual elements coexist with the concrete world of the earth, substances, and things" (5). Contemporary literary history acknowledges a strong attempt at balance in the works of German Realism, which was frequently referred to as "Idealrealismus" by Stifter's contemporaries. Indeed, Stifter is progressively understood by literary scholars as an author who epitomizes a [End Page 125] sense of balance. Saur rejects the outdated charge that Stifter was preoccupied with a simple description of the material world by showing how his representations of material objects are typically saturated with social significance. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, "Interactions with the Material," explores the material objects in which Stifter's characters come into contact. Although Saur, to a great extent, yields a basic checklist of personal belongings, she also emphasizes the cultural context of material items, although the examples she provides are not always connected in any meaningful way. Chapter 1, "Ownership of Possessions," for example, discusses the items (furniture, books) that are found within a bourgeois home, and she specifically attributes these possessions to the particular virtues of Biedermeier Austria. She also locates the value of such possessions in the continuity of generations, another important theme of nineteenth-century realist literature. In chapter 3, "Giving and Receiving Gifts," Saur introduces the anthropological representations of gift giving as a social custom. She attributes various gifts to corresponding circumstances, such as marriage or victories in battle, yet she does not typically offer much insight into the social practices themselves. As a result, analyses remain predominantly internal to the texts that she introduces. In the second part of the book, "Meanings of the Material," Saur shifts mostly toward natural objects: stones (chapter 5), as well as jewels and pearls (chapter 6). These chapters are rightly distinguished from the manmade objects explored in the first part of the book, yet the author does not emphasize this distinction. Rather, she claims quite generally to "address the meanings of substances given particular, even fundamental, significance" (7). With regard to stones, she underscores Stifter's personal interest in geology, contextualizing it within a growing public interest in such fields. This chapter also allows the author to focus on multiple stories from Stifter's Bunte Steine collection. Due to this centrality, this chapter would act as a valuable source for students seeking a general introduction to this popular collection of stories. In general, Saur's analyses would be beneficial to undergraduate students and general readers seeking a survey of Adalbert Stifter, first because she gives particular attention to his well-known works, namely Der Nachsommer, Witiko, and Bunte Steine. Second, Saur's cataloguing provides initial access to Stifter's masterly descriptive realism but also importantly indicates the complex cultural contexts that inform his material representations. Furthermore, the book reads easily, and as it evades theory altogether, it also avoids heavy [End Page 126] jargon. Her frequent return to the concepts of Biedermeier and Bildung maintains for the general reader a focused encounter with Stifter's texts. Saur's inquiry into Stifter would have benefited from a more explicit exposition of the cultural contexts specific to his various works. Relatedly, the study would also have benefited from a deeper engagement with secondary literature. She points toward some of this literature in the "Selected Secondary Literature" section at the end of the book but does not engage directly with much of this scholarship in her analyses. Additionally, the book's subtitle, "A Study in Poetic Realism," is odd, because she does not actively take up the matter of Realism as a literary style or period. On the contrary, Saur emphasizes a general idealist tendency in Stifter's literary works. She restricts...

Everything and Less

AbstractWhat does it mean to think of the rise of Amazon.com as an event in contemporary literary history? This essay analyzes the literary practices and programs “organic” to the Amazon digital ecology, including Kindle Direct Publishing, and then asks how the entrepreneurial logic, ethos, and temporality of “customer service” might be taken as the dominant logic of contemporary fiction as such.

A crítica feminista articulada ao literário

This paper presents a study of the feminist criticism connected to gender, seemed as a manner of discuss the male hegemony in the contemporary literary history. This is a review of Lucia Zolin comments about the trends advocated by the Anglo-American, French and Brazilian theories in the construction of identity and the difference’s spot. To this end, I believe that is important to tally the ambivalence’s game that culture maintains in its historical structure, from the perspective of Zygmunt Bauman. As Ella Shohat and other researchers, I associate the concept of flexible culture to the eurocentric attitude which presupposes the analysis of gender on the relations with different histories and geographies . In order to contemplate materiality of the analysis, it was chosen the reading and interpretation of feminist criticism offered by two masterworks: Navegacoes (1996), by Sophia de Mello Andresen, and O rio do meio (1996), by Lya Luft, that allow interconnections between fiction and reality on an examination of social structures that mediate choices in opposition to historically established oppression.

Simonian Writing According to Mireille Calle-Gruber

Abstract Mireille Calle-Gruber is not only a university professor and a writer, but also a leading scholar and critic of French literature and contemporary Francophone literature. Her works on Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Assia Djebar, Derrida and other contemporary writers (as well as those dealing with the history of the twentieth century literature) fill gaps in the contemporary literary history of the twentieth century. Her books not only scrutinize and analyze the writing of Claude Simon; they also shed new light on the analysis of the novel and autobiography in contemporary literature, through the memory of experience and perception

Imagining Jim Crow

Imagining Jim Crow Christopher Metress (bio) In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances. By Andrew Leiter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. x + 283 pp. $39.95 cloth. Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature. By Brian Norman. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. x + 214 pp. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), C. Vann Woodward argued that a deeper understanding of the history of post-Reconstruction segregation would help southerners to see their institutions and social arrangements as fluid rather than “inviolable by nature.” In proposing this new narrative, Woodward was trusting that a clearer picture of segregation’s past would allow for a better future, one that did not embrace racial hierarchy as essential to southern identity. Two new studies remind us that, more than fifty years after Woodward, we are still wrestling with Jim Crow’s legacy. In many ways, Andrew Leiter’s In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances and Brian Norman’s Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature demand to be read together. One should begin with Leiter, who in a series of carefully-argued chapters builds a persuasive case for how the “the black beast image,” which “developed slowly out of slavery and crystallized in white minds over the last decade of the nineteenth century,” was eventually deployed in the early twentieth century by black and white writers alike to challenge the fundamental assumptions of Jim Crow. If Leiter [End Page 145] is concerned with the role that one image played in the development of and discourse about segregation, Norman is interested in how the Jim Crow era is represented in narratives written after the civil rights movement and the dismantling of du jure segregation. According to Norman, “post-civil rights writers” fashion narratives about the Jim Crow era because those writers can “draw on the perceived clarity of that period to highlight and explain more elusive systems of racial disenfranchisement and division” existing in the present. As a result, a new genre has emerged, the “neo-segregation” narrative, and Norman argues eloquently for the importance of this genre in both contemporary literary history and current racial discourse. Leiter opens by arguing that, after Reconstruction, interracial sex was depicted differently in literature about the South. While abolitionists had trafficked in images of the lustful slave owner to combat the peculiar institution, southern writers after the war found a new weapon (the black beast image) in their fight to establish a new institution (segregation). “Gone was Stowe’s image of brute masters satisfying their lusts upon helpless enslaved women,” Leiter writes. “In its stead appeared the image of degenerate black men roaming the southern countryside looking to ravage unprotected white virgins.” The “black beast at the center of white unity and supremacy” was propagated best by Thomas Dixon, and Leiter persuasively argues that Dixon’s novels played a crucial role in solidifying segregation’s status as an inviolable social arrangement necessitated by black bestiality. Leiter’s second chapter gets to the heart of his project: juxtaposing how writers from the Harlem and Southern Renaissances engaged this inherited image of African American bestiality. Leiter begins with Walter White and James Weldon Johnson and their “literary efforts to redeem black masculinity.” Although White effectively exposed as unfounded the mass hysteria over black sexuality and transferred “the image of bestiality onto the white race,” Johnson’s redemption of black masculinity was more problematic. Unintentionally echoing Dixon’s novels, several interracial relationships in the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man suggest that “the black male and white female cannot share the same sexual space without incurring disaster.” In his next chapter, Leiter proposes a most intriguing juxtaposition: George Schuyler’s Black No More and William Faulkner’s Light in August. According to Leiter, both works “envision whiteness as a contested space,” and both authors propose “the same dual notion of a black sexual threat that simultaneously exists and does not exist” (in Schuyler because “any concept of [End Page 146] racial identity is ridiculous...

The Quest for German Nationhood and the Reception of Women in Histories of German Literature, 1835–1872

ABSTRACTWriting literary history has been understood as giving a politicised historical account of German culture ever since the inception of this genre in Germany with the publication of the Geschichte der poetischen National‐Literatur der Deutschen by Georg Gottfried Gervinus in 1835.1 The concerted view today is that it was the ‘shockwaves’ of the Napoleonic Age which had fuelled a desire to construct an order and propose a unity, at least in book form, which would prevent similar chaos ever happening again, and this intention informed the first histories of German literature.2 This paper will explore the role women were accorded in such histories, and the selection criteria which contributed to their exclusion or gave them the best chance to be included. It examines the intersection of the narrative of German literary history in the service of nation building, women's writing, and ‘Wissenschaftsgeschichte’ from a gendered perspective by comparing how women writers fared in notable works of contemporary literary history just before the events of the German Revolution of 1848/49 (Gervinus) until the unification of Germany in 1872 (Prutz, Gottschall and Kreyßig).

This compost: ecological imperatives in American poetry

Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings, and these traces define a collective voice in modern poetry independent of the more specific influences and backgrounds of the poets themselves. In This Compost Rasula surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview. Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s - Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan - and their successors. But This Compost extends to include earlier poets like Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other contemporary poets. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson also make appearances. Rasula draws this diverse group of poets together, uncovering how the past is a compost fertilizing the present. He looks at the heritage of ancient lore and the legacy of modern history and colonial violence as factors contributing to ecological imperatives in modern poetry. This Compost restores the dialogue between poetic language and the geophysical, biological realm of nature that so much postmodern discourse has sought to silence. It is a fully developed, carefully argued book that deals with an underrepresented element in modern American culture, where the natural world and those who write about it have been greatly neglected in contemporary literary history and theory.

The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America

Presented as the authentic testimony of the disenfranchised, the colonised, and the oppressed, has in the last two decades emerged as one of the most significant genres of Latin America's post-boom literature. In the political battles that have taken place around the formation of the canon, the testimonio holds a special place: no other single genre of literature has taken up such a large part of current debate. Initially hailed in the 1970s as a genuine form of resistance literature, testimonio has since undergone a significant change in its critical reception. The essays in The 'Real' Thing analyse the testimonio, its history, and its place in contemporary consciousness. Although the literature of testimony arose on the margins of institutional power and its ends were in large part political change, the canonisation of testimonio by the academic Left has moved it from margin to centre, ironically bringing about the institutionalisation of its transgressive and counter-hegemonic qualities. Discussing Latin American works ranging from Salvadorian writer Roque Dalton's Miguel Marmol to I...Rigoberta Menchu, a work that earned its author a Nobel Prize, this collection explores how critical writing about testimonio has turned into discourse about the institution of academia, the canon, postmodernism and postcolonialism, and the status of Latin American studies generally. The 'Real' Thing provides a view of a particularly revealing moment in contemporary literary history and a perspective on the place of the intellectual within the academic institution. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Latin American studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and comparative literature. Contributors: John Beverley, Santiago Colas, Georg M. Gugelberger, Barbara Harlow, Fredric Jameson, Alberto Moreiras, Margaret Randall, Javier Sanjines, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Doris Sommer, Gareth Williams, George Yudice, and Marc Zimmerman.

Poésie chicano : guerre des cultures, guerre des mots

Destabilizing both English and Spanish in its refusal to respect the integrity of national codes, interlingual Chicano poetry may well be a transitory form of combativity. Beyond the stigma of linguistic anarchy, and far removed from the predictable postulates of sociolinguistics, it has refined code-switching into an aesthetics. Endowed with euphonic and yet jarring beauty, it stands out, in contemporary literary history, a symbol of embattled cultures.

The Logic and Practice of Literary Nationalism

The Korean original of this article was first published in March 1988 and in December of that year won the Seoul Cultural Arts Criticism Award, sponsored by the Seoul shinmun newspaper. The author is Professor of Korean Literature at Seoul National University and a frequently published literary critic. He is also Editor of Munhak sasang (Literary thought) magazine. In this article, he accounts for the turn-of-the-century roots of Korean literary nationalism and sketches its development into the present. He argues that the nationalist literature of 1970s should be recognized as a distinct period in contemporary literary history and critically traces the emergence of literary populism in the 1980s.

Thomas Pynchon's Intrusion in the Enchanter's Domain

In November 1960, not long after Thomas Pynchon left Greenwich Village where he had been working on V., the D'Arcy Galleries opened a show of surrealist art directed by Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. The Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter's Domain, as the show was called, was the culmination of a long and fruitful contact between New York's artistic avant-garde and the French surrealists, leaving a permanent influence in American painting that has often been commented upon and at times debated.l This exchange between New York artistic circles and the French surrealists influenced not only the plastic arts, but the literary ones as well. Despite this, the attention given to the literary traces of the surrealists' intrusion in the enchanter's domain, as they termed the United States, has been scant and largely limited to poetry. Literary critics simply have not given nearly the attention art critics have to the surrealist presence in New York and its effects on our culture. As a consequence, a certain impoverishment exists in our understanding of contemporary literary history, not to mention literary forms. A case in point is Thomas Pynchon. Despite numerous allusions and references in V. to surrealism, for example, no literary analyses among the scores of articles devoted to V. since its publication in 1963 have taken into account the depth of Pynchon's involvement with the surrealist aesthetic. One suspects that the extremely reticent Pynchon may have felt obliged to put his cards on the table recently, when he wrote in the Introduction to Slow Learner, his collection of five early stories, four of them written while he was a student at Cornell, I had

The Secret Agent: The Agon(ie)s of the Word

Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair had been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness. 1 Tenniel's illustration of Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland supplies Conrad with model for Verloc's (and other anarchists') dandyism, though not without his consciousness of masculine fripperies in fashionable circles of London. Appropriately, Verloc later morosely ponders his failure to dynamite Greenwich Meridian Observatory in the little parlour of Cheshire (SA, 191) as Conrad's reminder that Cheshire Cat directs Alice to Mad Tea-Party. Later he also salutes Humpty-Dumpty for his inspiration in molding arbitrary word-worlds of his characters in novel. Immediately pun on sleekness, to conceal, betrays deceit of Verloc's respectability. However, Cheshire Cheese also directs attention to another facet of contemporary literary history. The name of a club in London, it headquartered Rhymer's Club, founded by William Butler Yeats to promote esthetic fantasies of Walter Pater. Verloc's dandyism, no

Literature in Exile: Adele Gerhard

AMONG the men and women who had established themselves in Germany as writers of note, and who have found refuge in the United States after Hitler crushed free intellectual activity in Europe, Adele Gerhard is an outstanding and venerable figure. Soergel, in his history of contemporary literature,' ranks her with the expressionists, though he seems to think that her work is not to be identified with any one particular movement: Frau verkniipft wie Adele Gerhard durch Willen und Werk zwei Menschenalter. Keine reicht . . wie sie einem dritten die Hand. Since as a girl with dreamy eyes she watched day by day the Rhine and saw the great wheels of the endlessly passing tugboats whip the endlessly passing waves, change was her proper element-as the earth changes with the seasons. Julius Hart called her the woman of immer wieder neuer Wandelungen, tiefgreifender Entwickelungen, steter Wiederverjiingungen.''2 Adele Gerhard spent her childhood in Cologne and after her marriage settled in Berlin, her home until she left Germany in 1938. Social work brought her in contact with outstanding women abroad like Beatrice Webb, Susan B. Anthony, and others. Soon, however, she became convinced that creative writing, which had attracted her from her very girlhood, was her proper way of fulfilment. Her first short story had been published as early as 1894. With her earlier books she seemed to adhere to the realistic school of the late nineteenth century. Die Geschichte der Antonie van Heese3 (1906) gave her own experiences in the social movement of the 1890's; Vom Sinken und Werden (1911), which deals with the development of her native town Cologne during the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as Am alten Graben (1917) with the background of Berlin, deal with events predominantly under the aspect of a conflict between tradition and modern progress; here we have already the germ for her later point of view which was to be