Böcker av Eric Downing

Special volume treating exemplars of the vast number of texts arising from historic and imaginary encounters between Jews and non-Jewish Germans, from the early modern period to the present.

The series Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Studies in German Literature) presents outstanding analyses of German-speaking literature from the early modern period to the present day. It particularly embraces comparative, cultural and historical-epistemological questions and serves as a tradition-steeped forum for innovative literary research. All submitted manuscripts undergo a double peer-review process. Please contact the editor Dr. Marcus Bohm (marcus.boehm [at] degruyter.com) for further information regarding manuscript submission and subsidies.

In The Chain of Things, Eric Downing shows how the connection between divinatory magic and reading shaped the experience of reading and aesthetics among nineteenth-century realists and modernist thinkers. He explores how writers, artists, and critics such as Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin drew on the ancient practice of divination, connecting the Greek idea of sympathetic magic to the German aesthetic concept of the attunement of mood and atmosphere.Downing deftly traces the genealogical connection between reading and art in classical antiquity, nineteenth-century realism, and modernism, attending to the ways in which the modern re-enchantment of the world-both in nature and human society-consciously engaged ancient practices that aimed at preternatural prediction. Of particular significance to the argument presented in The Chain of Things is how the future figured into the reading of texts during this period, a time when the future as a narrative determinant or article of historical faith was losing its force. Elaborating a new theory of magic as a critical tool, Downing secures crucial links between the governing notions of time, world, the "e;real,"e; and art.

"Downing's highly original, thorough, and rewarding book is certain to emerge as an indispensable critical reference-point for scholars and students in the area of narrative theory, problems of realism, and 19th-century German prose. . . . A nearly ideal combination of intellectual scope, erudition, and originality." -Thomas Pfau, Duke University