Breaking boundaries
Subtitle: a new generation of poets in the GDR
By: Karen Leeder.
Series: Oxford modern languages and literature monographs
Publisher: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 369
Subjects: German poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; German poetry -- Germany (East) -- History and criticism.
Description: This book examines the controversial younger generation of poets who were 'born into' the established socialist state of the German Democratic Republic.

Introducing an extraordinary decade of GDR poetry, it focuses on the ways in which this experience is translated into the metaphorical and linguistic structures of their texts, and the ways in which they set about breaking the literary and political boundaries which were imposed upon them, radicalizing notions of the subject, of history, of language, of the poetic enterprise itself.

The volume also assesses what will remain - after the fall of the Wall, and the revelations of the 'Stasi' files - of this radical poetic project. This unique study examines the poetry of some fifty writers from both the official and the underground publishing scenes, offering them up as a case-study in the vexed negotiations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and as a contribution to the rewriting of German literary history after 1945.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [309]-355) and index.