Herta M?ller

This volume is a critical companion to the works of Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. Müller (1953-) is a Romanian-German novelist, essayist and producer of collages whose work has been compared with that of W.G. Sebald and Franz Kafka. The Nobel Committee described her as a writer 'who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed'. In works such as Niederungen (Nadirs), Herztier (The Land of Green Plums), Reisende auf einem Bein (Traveling on One Leg), and Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel), all written in German but translated worldwide, Müller addresses vital contemporary issues such as dictatorship, migration, memory, and the ongoing legacy of fascist and communist rule in Europe. Her works are written in a rich, poetic language which imbues them with great power and depth. They exceed national boundaries and have universal appeal; they speak to a global audience attuned to political oppression and its lasting effects. This volume, containing contributions by an international team of scholars, introduces the work of one of Europe's foremost contemporary writers to a world audience. Individual chapters deal with Müller's major works and her volumes of collages. Other chapters explore her poetics and the Romanian background as well as themes, such as gender and life writing, running throughout her work, and her worldwide reception through the media and the medium of translation.

1 - Introduction
2 - Beyond Realism:Herta Müller's Poetics
3 - Beyond the Land of Green Plums: Romanian culture and language in Herta Müller's work
4 - The Presence of the Unresolved Recent Past: Herta Müller and the Securitate
5 - 'Stadt und Schädel', 'Reisende' and 'Verlorene': city, self and survival in Herta Müller's Reisende auf einem Bein
6 - A Mutilated Fox Fur: Examining the Contexts of Imagery in Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger
7 - 'Macht nichts, macht nichts, sagte ich mir, macht nichts': Herta Müller's Romanian Novels
8 - Return from the Archipelago: Herta Müller's Atemschaukel as soft memory
9 - 'So fremd war das Gebilde': The Interaction between Visual and Verbal in Herta Müller's Prose and Collages
10 - Gender and the Sexual Politics of Exchange in Herta Müller's Prose
11 - Eastward bound: Herta Müller's international reception
12 - Herta Müller in Translation
13 - Life and Literature: Autobiography, Referentiality and Intertextuality in Herta Müller's Work
14 - Famously Literary? The Nobel Prize and Herta Müller's Authorial Body

Brigid Haines is Reader in German at Swansea University. Her research focuses on gender and culture, and the 'eastern turn' in contemporary German literature. She is the author (with Margaret Littler) of Contemporary German Women's Writing: Changing the Subject, and of Dialogue and Narrative Design in the Works of Adalbert Stifter, and has edited books on Herta Müller and (with Lyn Marven) Libuse Moníková. ; Lyn Marven is Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses particularly on contemporary literature, and she is the author of Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German: Herta Müller, Libuse Moníková and Kerstin Hensel; she has also edited volumes on Libuse Moníková (with Brigid Haines), Cultural Impact (with Rebecca Braun) and Emerging Novelists (with Stuart Taberner).