Publisher's Synopsis
This volume, like the conference which gave rise to it, aims to recontextualize Rilke's writing by placing it within a broad perspective of Modernist theories of art and culture. Rilke is read against such diverse authors and thinkers as Baudelaire, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Freud, Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Schuler, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. His much neglected French poetry is revisited; his reception of Cézanne is reviewed in the light of Merleau-Ponty's theory of painting, and there is extensive discussion of his anti-mimetic understanding of the nature of art and poetry, including a re-evaluation of the importance for his work of the aesthetics of the sublime. In keeping with the overall attempt to position Rilke within new interpretative frames, both his novel Malte Laurids Brigge and his unjustly ignored translation of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese are re-examined in relation to gender theory.
