Boydell & Brewer

We are the machine; the computer, the internet, and information in contemporary German literature.

The computer revolution has made many people uneasy about how information technology can be misused or abused. In this scholarly book, Youngman (German, University of North Carolina-Charlotte) looks at the literary response to IT in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland since the 1990s. Focusing primarily on eleven works written between 1995 and 2006 (including Heidenreich's Die Nacht der Händler and Grass' Im Krebsgang, the author investigates the border between the human and the technological — a border that he suggests is an increasingly imaginary one. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Women and death 2; warlike women in the German literary and cultural imagination since 1500.

This diverse collection of essays by U.K. and German scholars looks at how Amazons, female terrorists, and other warlike women have appeared in Germany's arts, thought, scholarship, and imagination over the past five centuries. In essays ranging in topic from changes in the literary portrayals of Amazons in the 18th and 19th centuries to gender relations and the "socialist soldier" in the former East Germany, contributors identify patterns in the ways that warlike women have been represented. For example, what does it mean to have women occupying a traditionally male role — that of warrior? How have images in which women and violence are linked changed over time? Has feminism or recent political developments in Germany affected the ways in which warlike women (such as Ulrike Meinhof of the terrorist Red Army Faction) are portrayed? Of particular interest are the essays dealing with how the female image has been used to represent the German nation. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)