Germany and German thought in American literature and cultural criticism

Twenty-three essays by distinguished American Studies specialists from Germany and the United States provide an informative tour d’horizon of the “Deutschlandbilder” to be found in American literature and of the influence of German thought upon cultural criticism in contemporary America. Among the American authors discussed in detail are George Santayana and H. L. Mencken in the fields of philosophy and cultural criticism and Upton Sinclair, Kay Boyle, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, and Thomas Pynchon in the fields of narrative literature; and among the German thinkers investigated with regard to their influence in America are Marx, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Adorno.