This volume focuses on the flourishing of irony as a primary characteristic of the great era of European narrative sophistication from the Goethezeit to Modernism. Its eighteenth essays explore varieties of ironic consciousness associated with texts especially of northern Europe, and the ways they established a dialogue with and on literature and culture at large. As the volume shows, this interrogation of Europe's self-awareness of cultural identity bound up in reading and writing habits gained a new post-Cervantine complexity in Romanticism and has been of lasting significance for literary theory down to postmodernism. By its comparativistic framing of the issues raised by ironic consciousness, Narrative Ironies duly serves as a Festschrift honoring Lilian R. Furst. Among major writers treated are Sterne, Goethe, Godwin, Schlegel, Hoffmann, Poe, Stendhal, Kierkegaard, Disraeli, Keller, Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans, Wilde, Tolstoi, Hofmannsthal, Strindberg, Proust, Mann, Musil, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and Szczypiorski.
Table of contents:Raymond A. PRIER: Introduction. I: NARRATIVE IRONY. Walter A. STRAUSS: In Search of Exactitude and Style: The Example of Proust and Musil. Clayton KOELB: Wrestling with Proteus: Irony in Kierkegaard's Either/Or. Gerald GILLESPIE: The Haunted Narrator before the Gate. Frederick BURWICK: "Transcendental Buffoonery" and the Bifurcated Novel. II: AMBIGUOUS IRONIES. Lilian R. FURST: "Yes and No": Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimer. Madeline G. LEVINE: Nostalgia for Apocalypse: Andrzej Szczypiorski's The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman. E.F. KAELIN: "If you could just ravel out into time . . ." Barry JACOBS: Strindberg's Binoculars: Narrative Perspectives in the The Roofing Ceremony. John and Carol GARRARD: Casting the First Stone: Vengeance and Forgiveness in Anna Karenina. III: MYSTERIOUS IRONIES. Patricia MERIVALE: Gumshoe Gothics: "The Man of the Crowd" and His Followers. Deborah A. HARTER: Silenced by the City: Maupassant's Flâneur and Uneasy Dreams. Hans EICHNER: Against the Grain: Huysmans' A rebours, Wilde's Dorian Gray, and Hofmannsthal's Der Tor und der Tod. Albert S. GÉRARD: Renée's Tangled Ancestry: Zola's Curée and Racine's Phédre. Willi GOETSCHEL: Love, Sex, and Other Utilities: Keller's Unsettling Account. IV: INTERGENERIC IRONIES. John NEUBAUER: Mimeticism and Intertextuality in "Ritter Gluck". George A. KENNEDY: On Reading Disraeli with Stendhal. Gregory MAERTZ: Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century: Generic Diversity and the Romantic Travel Novel. Raymond Adolph PRIER: Charlotte's Vicar and Goethe's Eighteenth-Century Tale about Werther. Gerald GILLESPIE: Afterword.
Table of contents:Raymond A. PRIER: Introduction. I: NARRATIVE IRONY. Walter A. STRAUSS: In Search of Exactitude and Style: The Example of Proust and Musil. Clayton KOELB: Wrestling with Proteus: Irony in Kierkegaard's Either/Or. Gerald GILLESPIE: The Haunted Narrator before the Gate. Frederick BURWICK: "Transcendental Buffoonery" and the Bifurcated Novel. II: AMBIGUOUS IRONIES. Lilian R. FURST: "Yes and No": Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimer. Madeline G. LEVINE: Nostalgia for Apocalypse: Andrzej Szczypiorski's The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman. E.F. KAELIN: "If you could just ravel out into time . . ." Barry JACOBS: Strindberg's Binoculars: Narrative Perspectives in the The Roofing Ceremony. John and Carol GARRARD: Casting the First Stone: Vengeance and Forgiveness in Anna Karenina. III: MYSTERIOUS IRONIES. Patricia MERIVALE: Gumshoe Gothics: "The Man of the Crowd" and His Followers. Deborah A. HARTER: Silenced by the City: Maupassant's Flâneur and Uneasy Dreams. Hans EICHNER: Against the Grain: Huysmans' A rebours, Wilde's Dorian Gray, and Hofmannsthal's Der Tor und der Tod. Albert S. GÉRARD: Renée's Tangled Ancestry: Zola's Curée and Racine's Phédre. Willi GOETSCHEL: Love, Sex, and Other Utilities: Keller's Unsettling Account. IV: INTERGENERIC IRONIES. John NEUBAUER: Mimeticism and Intertextuality in "Ritter Gluck". George A. KENNEDY: On Reading Disraeli with Stendhal. Gregory MAERTZ: Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century: Generic Diversity and the Romantic Travel Novel. Raymond Adolph PRIER: Charlotte's Vicar and Goethe's Eighteenth-Century Tale about Werther. Gerald GILLESPIE: Afterword.