Benjamin's Library

Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language, and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg and The Intervention of Philology: Gender, Learning, and Power in Lohenstein's Roman Plays.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsTextual NoteIntroduction: Benjamin's Baroque: A Lost Object?1. Inventing the Baroque: A Critical History of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century DebatesThe Renaissance of the German Baroque in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue"Locating Baroque StyleOrigin and the "Heroic" Age of the German Literary Baroque2. The Plays Are the Thing: Textual Politics and the German DramaThe Origin of the Silesian School: Nationalism and the Baroque Tragic DramaCollecting the Baroque: Editing the German Dramatic TraditionThe Task of the Translator: Shakespeare as German Tragic Drama3. Melancholy Germans: War Theology, Allegory, and the Lutheran BaroqueBenjamin's Hamlet in the Crosshairs of War TheologyReforming the Baroque: Benjamin on Warburg on LutherAllegory, Emblems, and Gryphius's Catharina von GeorgienConclusion: Baroque Legacies: National Socialism's BenjaminBibliographyIndex

Newman's study offers an astonishingly thorough reconstruction of the Trauerspiel book's enabling intellectual conditions, paying special attention to the debates in art history, literary history, and theology since the nineteenth century and around World War I.... Newman's provocative study offers an image of Benjamin that runs counter to the accepted version of the writer as the quintessentially cosmopolitan, border-crossing intellectual... [and] sets news standards for a return to archival research, historical reconstruction, and philological rigor in Benjamin studies.(Monatshefte)