Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: A Transnational Literary Field in the Age of Nationalism
- 1 The Passion of Johannes Scherr: Historiography as Trauma
- 2 Between Integration and Differentiation: On the Relationship between German and Austrian Literature in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 Reading Stifter in America
- 4 Travel Writing and Transnational Marketing: How Ida Pfeiffer brought the World to Austria and Beyond
- 5 Ernst Brausewetter's Meisternovellen Deutscher Frauen (1897–98): Gender, Genre, and (Inter)National Aspiration
- 6 Arbiter of Nation? The Strange Case of Hans Müller-Casenov's The Humour of Germany (1892/1893)
- 7 Visualizing the End: Nation, Empire, and Neo-Roman Mimesis in Keller and Fontane
- 8 Eurocentric Cosmopolitanism in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks
- 9 European Peace from a Transatlantic Perspective: Victor Hugo and Bertha von Suttner
- 10 Hermann Graf Keyserling and Gu Hongming’s Ethics of World Culture: Confucianism, Monarchism, and Anti-Colonialism
- 11 Constructing Symphonic Worlds: Gustav Mahler, Weltliteratur, and the Musical Program
- 12 The Garb of National Literature: Transnational Identities and the Early Twentieth-Century Schriftstreit
- 13 From European Symbolism to German Gesture: The International and Transnational Nationalism of Stefan George's Blätter für die Kunst
- 14 Canon Fire: Dada's Attack on National Literature
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
6 - Arbiter of Nation? The Strange Case of Hans Müller-Casenov's The Humour of Germany (1892/1893)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: A Transnational Literary Field in the Age of Nationalism
- 1 The Passion of Johannes Scherr: Historiography as Trauma
- 2 Between Integration and Differentiation: On the Relationship between German and Austrian Literature in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 Reading Stifter in America
- 4 Travel Writing and Transnational Marketing: How Ida Pfeiffer brought the World to Austria and Beyond
- 5 Ernst Brausewetter's Meisternovellen Deutscher Frauen (1897–98): Gender, Genre, and (Inter)National Aspiration
- 6 Arbiter of Nation? The Strange Case of Hans Müller-Casenov's The Humour of Germany (1892/1893)
- 7 Visualizing the End: Nation, Empire, and Neo-Roman Mimesis in Keller and Fontane
- 8 Eurocentric Cosmopolitanism in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks
- 9 European Peace from a Transatlantic Perspective: Victor Hugo and Bertha von Suttner
- 10 Hermann Graf Keyserling and Gu Hongming’s Ethics of World Culture: Confucianism, Monarchism, and Anti-Colonialism
- 11 Constructing Symphonic Worlds: Gustav Mahler, Weltliteratur, and the Musical Program
- 12 The Garb of National Literature: Transnational Identities and the Early Twentieth-Century Schriftstreit
- 13 From European Symbolism to German Gesture: The International and Transnational Nationalism of Stefan George's Blätter für die Kunst
- 14 Canon Fire: Dada's Attack on National Literature
- Selected Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
“From China to Peru” the globe will be traversed in search of its jokes, insofar as they have recorded themselves in literature… . In each of these volumes, the object will be to give an ontology of the humorous literature of the particular nation dealt with.
The word Humour admits of many interpretations. For the purposes of this Series, it has been interpreted in its broadest generic sense, to cover humour in all its phases as it has manifested itself among the various nationalities. Necessarily founded on a certain degree of scholarly knowledge, these volumes, while appealing to the literary reader, will nevertheless, it is hoped … in the inherent attractiveness and variety of their contents, appeal successfully and at once to the interest of readers of all classes.
The modes of thought and feeling [are] more strongly marked by provincial locality than by nationality… . Fundamentally, the German character appears to be averse to humour.
Transposed: A Book, an Editor, and a Nation?
Hans Müller-Casenov's The Humour of Germany is a strange book. First published in 1892 in London, it appeared—from 1893 on—as a joint imprint of Walter Scott Publishing Co. and Charles Scribner's Sons in London and New York City, respectively. Widely advertised throughout the 1890s and initially less widely reviewed, the book showed up almost immediately in library catalogs in the United States (and with slight delays in Britain). Even today, this English-language anthology, in all its 437 pages, retains some dormant presence on library shelves in the US, where documented holdings of 101 copies—with three fourths in university and one fourth in public libraries—by far outnumber those in other, mostly English-speaking countries combined (forty-seven copies). Its inclusion in HathiTrust's electronic depository widens access and availability and enables the book's material revival by making print-on-demand copies readily available. This is remarkable; as the volume has evaded the attention of literary scholars, it is not referenced in literary historiography and has literally disappeared from library shelves to be stashed in off-site storage facilities.
Its all-but-vanishing act notwithstanding, the book tells an impressive story: one about imagined readership in the transatlantic Anglophone world of the 1890s and about an effort to make Germany's literary nation palatable to readers outside of that nation.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2023