928 Reviews remains unclear). Overall Hanus tries to cover toomuch, and thus leaves too little space to develop her own focus. University of Liverpool Lyn Marven Provinz und Metropole: Zum Verhdltnis von Regionalismus und Urbanitdt in der Literatur. Ed. by Dieter Burdorf and Stefan Matuschek. (Beitrage zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, 254) Heidelberg: Winter. 2008. 420 pp. 55. ISBN 978-3-8253-5429-9. This edited volume is part of the recent trend in literary studies to focus on questions of space and place. Comprising nineteen essays, itdraws on a range of national literatures from the late eighteenth century to the present day to explore the complex interrelationship between province' and 'metropolis'. Dedicated to the recently retired Jena comparatist Gerhard R. Kaiser, the volume largely refuses to rehearse the familiar readings attached to that binary which pit the reassuringly traditional province against the fragmented modernist metropolis. Though the volume's scope and compass are deliberately broad, the essays stickmore or less to two lines of argument: firstly,as modern literature is becoming increasingly urban and indeed global, itnevertheless remains grounded locally, and secondly, literature's localism or regionalism can be read as aesthetically and politically pro gressive, rather than being merely reactionary or anti-modernist. In his opening essayWolfgang Braungart sketches the emergence of the notion of urbanity' in the eighteenth century and its implications for literature and pub lic life.As a number of the subsequent essays demonstrate, this kind of literary urbanity' remained open to the province. Gunter Oesterle, writing on Moritz von Thummel's Reise in die mittdglichen Provinzen von Frankreich (1791), and Olaf Muller (onMadame de Stael) chart the flexiblemetonymies that can occur between literary constructions of province and metropolis. Such metonymies even pervade Baudelaire's resolutely urban and modernist work, as JanRohnert's essay suggests. Through a careful reading of Biichner's Dantons Tod, Gerhard Kurz is able to show precise correspondences between the revolutionary rhetoric articulated in this Paris-based play and the rhetoric of regional revolutionary groups in central Germany, with which Biichner was in contact. Elsewhere, Wolfgang G. Muller und Kurt Muller bring the category of gender to bear on their readings of the regionalist novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and William Dean Howells respectively. Other essays adopt an approach somewhere between historical sketch and detailed textual study.Monika Schmitz-Emans offers a typology of themany fictitious and real cities, towns, and villages in Jean Paul's works that is as useful as it iswitty. Closer to the spiritual home of this collection, Conrad Wiedemann explores the cultural topographies of Jena andWeimar in the eras of Classicism and Romanti cism, whereas StefanMatuschek explores how the periodical Das Athendum draws on Berlin's urbanity to construct German Romanticism. Another group of essays is concerned with twentieth-century literature.What becomes clear here is how profoundly the terms province' and 'metropolis' have MLR, 105.3, 2oio 929 been affected not just by themodern writers' own outlook and poetics, but by social and political change as well. A number of essays suggest how thewell-known mo dernist critique of the self can be understood as a radical revaluation of the terms province' and 'metropolis', e.g. JanUrbich's fine piece on Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, Heinrich Macher on the Expressionist writer Carl Sternheim, and Eduardo Castadura on Valery Larbaud. Other essays view thatkind of revaluation inovertly political terms. Dirk Oschmann, in charting the wide-ranging debate between volkisch and liberal writers in the final years ofWeimar Germany, discusses the different values attached by both sides to the non-metropolitan 'landscape', and Uwe Steltner demonstrates how Russian regional prose in the final decades of the Soviet Union served as a corrective to political and cultural ideology. The final set of essays explores theways inwhich migration, exile, and globalization affect the relationship between metropolis and province in contemporary literature.Dieter Burdorf's fine comparative essay on Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott is a most convincing demonstration of this idea, though Gottfried Willems on the twenty first-centuryGerman Heimat novel and Reingard Nethersole on the South African writer Ivan Vladislavic touch on similar issues. The merits of the volume lie in its comparative approach to the topic, and in the...
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Jun 1, 2015
Ranit Chatterjee + 4
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