Course summary

Research areas include: Anglo-German cultural relations, including comparative literature and cultural studies, the comparative history of ideas, the history of British ‘Germanistik’, cultural transfer, linguistic relations, translation theory and travel writing; Jewishness and German culture, including German-Jewish writing, exile and holocaust studies, and the rhetoric of anti-semitism; German, Austrian and Swiss Literature in their social contexts, including Sociability, Spas and Salons; womens writing; gay and lesbian studies; German thought from Lichtenberg to the present, including Goethe and his age; Nietzsche, Freud and the history of psychoanalysis; hermeneutics; the Frankfurt School and queer theory; poetry, poetics and poetologies, including Droste-H, lshoff, Rilke, and Celan; German Literature between 1945 and 1989, especially GDR literature before and after the ‘Wende’, Hubert Fichte and Uwe Johnson; German linguistics, centred on dialectology and sociolinguistics, with a particular interest in contemporary German-speaking societies.