Epic and Exile
ISBN: 9780810131491
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Northwestern University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: German fiction; Anti-fascist movements in literature.; Exiles'' writings German;

The antifascist exile beginning in 1933 led to a cooling among the émigrés of the artistic and literary modernist experiments of the Weimar Republic and to a return to realism and the traditional novel form. Epic and Exile examines the Popular Front- oriented cultural initiatives of the 1930s less in terms of their political strategy than in their function as a cultural and literary program for the exiles, implying a specific relationship to questions of artistic form, historical conceptions, and indeed the political as such. A popular front aesthetics is, Bivens argues, realist and modernist at once, and, in its focus on the opacities and contradictions of everyday life as a historical formation, it is particularly concerned with problems of the epic form.

HUNTER BIVENS is an assistant professor of literature and German studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz.


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