Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
German Political Tragedy: The Machiavellian Plot and the Necessary Crime

German Political Tragedy: The Machiavellian Plot and the Necessary Crime

Robertson, Ritchie

Hardcover

Series: Germanic Literatures, Book 32

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1839543256
ISBN13: 9781839543258
Publisher: Legenda
Published: Jul 29 2024
Pages: 330
Weight: 1.60
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

German literature from roughly 1750 to 1850 has a tradition of tragic drama unmatched by any other literature in that period. To an extent seldom recognized, this drama engages with political themes. Robertson traces these themes back to the thought of Machiavelli, its reception, and its frequent distortion by subsequent theorists, especially in the early modern concept of 'reason of state' and the nineteenth-century notion of Realpolitik. Writers from the Baroque dramatist Lohenstein via Goethe, Schiller and Kleist, through Nietzsche and Wagner and on down to Brecht and Hochhuth in the twentieth century employ the tragic dilemmas of history or mythology to exemplify the hard political choices we may also have to make in the present. Were the troubling decisions of Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, Wallenstein, and Pope Pius XII genuinely necessary? Were their machiavels and courtiers offering wise counsel, or cynical amorality?

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