Cross-disciplinary perspectives on responses to material and spiritual loss in early modern Germany trace how individuals and communities registered, coped with, and made sense of deprivation through a spectrum of activities, often turning loss into gain and acquiring agency.
Set in postbellum America, the book explores the significant impact of German women's fiction on American readers from 1866 to 1917. It highlights how nearly 100 original texts and over 180 translations, primarily by American women, transformed these novels through adaptation and marketing. This cultural exchange not only introduced themes of adventure and domestic bliss but also reshaped perceptions of German culture. The translated works promised readers fulfilling narratives that blended sentiment with the allure of an idealized Germany, enriching the American literary landscape.
Examines the genesis and circulation in America of reprinted books that were foreign in origin over four decades and beyond.
"This volume examines the circulation and adaptation of German culture in the United States during the so-called long nineteenth century - the century of mass German migration to the new world, of industrialization and new technologies, American westward expansion and Civil War, German struggle toward national unity and civil rights, and increasing literacy on both sides of the Atlantic. Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America places its emphasis on the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. Informed by a conception of culture as multivalent, permeable, and protean, the book focuses on the mechanisms, agents, and means of mediation between cultural spaces."--BOOK JACKET