This is the third and final volume of papers given at the ‘Fragile Tradition’ conference in Cambridge, 2002. Together these volumes provide a conspectus of current research on the cultural, historical and literary imagination of the German-speaking world in the period since 1500. This volume highlights the connections between developments in technology and scientific thought since the sixteenth century on the one hand, and the ways in which the creative imagination of literary writers has responded to those developments on the other. It focuses particularly on the changing conceptions of nature, art, and what it means to be human in the modern period, as the effects of industrial technology and biological knowledge became apparent. It also explores the impact on literary writing and the established reading culture of the new media of photography, film and telecommunication in the twentieth century.

The Editors: Christian Emden studied at Konstanz and Cambridge (Ph.D. 2000), and is now Assistant Professor of German at Rice University, Houston. He was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, from 2000 to 2003. He is the author of Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (2005). David Midgley studied at Oxford (DPhil 1975). He was a Humboldt Scholar in 1979, and is now Reader in German Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. He is the author of Writing Weimar (2000) and many other publications in the field of German literary modernism.