Footnote:
In English
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web
Description:
A critical reading of both literary and non-literary German texts published between 1490 and 1540 exposes a populist backlash against perceived social and political disruptions, the dramatic expansion of spatial and epistemological horizons, and the growth of global trade networks. These texts opposed the twin phenomena of pluralization and secularization, which promoted a Humanist tolerance for ambiguity, boosted globalization and spatial expansion around 1500, and promoted new ways of imagining the world. Part I considers threats to the political order and the protestations against them, above all a vigorous defense of the common good. Part II traces the intellectual and epistemological upheaval triggered by the spatial discoveries and the new methods of visual and verbal representation of space. Part III examines the nationalistic backlash triggered by the rising global trade and related abusive trading practices and by perceived undue foreign influences. It is the basic premise of this book that the texts examined here protested the observed disruptions of the status quo and sought to reestablish a stable imperial order in the face of political and social upheaval and of the felt cultural decline of the German nation
Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Introduction -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Order and Discipline: Visions and Anxieties -- Chapter 2. Gute Policey: Saving or Disrupting the Order? -- Chapter 3. Defending Order and Discipline in Dyl Ulenspiegel -- Chapter 4. A Dystopian Topsy-Turvy World -- Chapter 5. Innovation and Progress as Agents of Decline -- Chapter 6. History as Decline and Brant’s Vision of the End of History -- Chapter 7. The Communal Order and the Problem of Self-Interest -- Chapter 8. The Decline of the Community: Common Good and Self-Interest as Literary Metaphors -- Introduction -- Chapter 9. Spatial Expansion and Its Narratives -- Chapter 10. From Chronicle to Cosmography (and Chorography): The Rise of Synchronic Narratives of the World -- Chapter 11. Ptolemy’s Grid and the New Cosmography in Germany: Waldseemüller and His Legacy -- Chapter 12. Emancipation from Ancient Concepts of Space -- Chapter 13. Spatial Discoveries: Anxieties and Rejection in Brant’s Writings -- Chapter 14. Spatial Anxieties in Literary Texts of the Early Sixteenth Century -- Chapter 15. America and the Epistemological Crisis of Space: An Afterthought -- Chapter 16. Theory of Early Modern Globalization -- Chapter 17. The Emerging Global Trade from a German Perspective -- Chapter 18. The Backlash Against the New Economy -- Chapter 19. Macro-Economic Critique of the Emerging Global Trade -- Chapter 20. Nationalistic and Xenophobic Responses to Foreign Influences -- Chapter 21. The Global Spice Trade: Breaching Traditional Values and Violating the Divine Order -- Chapter 22. The Backlash Against Globalization: The Rhetoric of Moral Decline and the Nostalgia Project -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index