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Zusatztext Highly original and immensely readable, Rebecca Braun’s impressive study provides us with a new model for understanding literary authorship and the contexts and factors that shape it in the twentieth century and beyond. The result is both a brilliant reading of cultural history and an important theoretical re-evaluation of known concepts of authorship. Through detailed interpretations of a stunning variety of cultural texts and archives (novels, journalistic writings, poetry, films and documentaries, social networks, places, and objects), Braun develops four distinct modes of performative authorship (celebratory, commemorative, utopian, satirical) and shows how they can overlap, coalesce, and inflect one another. She uses this innovative framework to read of some of the most important texts of the German-language canon in East and West Germany; she moves from the writing of the “literary giants” of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann to the contemporary, transnational texts of Olga Martynova and Katja Petrowskaja. Conversations with three female authors round out this remarkable book and illustrate in practice Braun’s central argument that authorship is a co-creative, iterative process. Authors and the World will be an indispensable reference in German Studies on contemporary literary authorship. I loved reading it! Informationen zum Autor Rebecca Braun is Established Professor of German and World Literature and Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies at University of Galway, Ireland. She has published widely on practices of authorship around the world, and with particular expertise in German-language writing. Major publications include Constructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass (2008), Cultural Impact in the German Context (2010; co-edited with Lyn Marven), Transnational German Studies (2020; co-edited with Benedict Schofield), and World Authorship (2020; co-edited with Tobias Boes & Emily Spiers). Klappentext Authors and the World traces how four core 'modes of authorship' have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. 'Modes of authorship' are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu's literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Rebecca Braun sets out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. In varying combinations and with deep roots in 19th- and early 20th-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. Authors and the World provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship. Vorwort Reconstructing literary practice across the last 75 years of carefully contextualized German history, this study provides a new ontology of authorship: how literature is created by people and why this matters to the wider world. Zusammenfassung Authors and the World traces how four core ‘m...
