The Total Work of Art Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations [Hardcover]

For two centuries,Gesamtkunstwerkthe ideal of the total work of arthas exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner,Gesamtkunstwerks lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the ideas evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

David Imhoofis Associate Professor of History at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. His book,Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in G?ttingen between the World Wars, appeared with University of Michigan Press in 2013. He has published on sports, film, and sharpshooting in interwar Germany and is co-editing a forthcoming edition ofColloquia Germanicaon sound studies. He directs the Music and Sound Studies Network for the German Studies Association.

Margaret Eleanor Menninger?is NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. She has published articles on the history of cultural philanthropy in both the United States and Germany, and was a contributor to?The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia. She is completing a book entitled?A Serious Matter and True Joy: Philanthropy, the Arts, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Leipzig.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables

Foreword
Celia Applegate

Acknowledgements