The essays in this volume are based on papers given at an International Symposium held at the University of Nottingham in September 2001. They investigate aspects of German and central European culture from the late eighteenth century to the contemporary era, dealing with aesthetic forms such as narrative, theatre, poetry and photography in the context of counter-cultural institutional and theoretical initiatives. These include the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century roots of 1960s and 1970s counter-culture and terrorism as well as anti-modern, anti-urban and green movements since the turn of the twentieth century. The volume also deals with new conceptions of art and the relationship between aesthetics and politics on the left and right which emerged in the wake of modernism. Other focal points are alternative political movements since the 1960s, notably the Red Army Faction and its literary affiliations.

The Editors: Dr Steve Giles is Reader in German Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham. His publications include Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the ‘Threepenny Lawsuit’ (Peter Lang, 1998), Brecht on Art and Politics (co-edited with Tom Kuhn, Methuen, 2003), and numerous essays in sociological aesthetics, comparative literature and critical theory. Dr Maike Oergel is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen. National Myth in 19th-century English and German Literature (de Gruyter, 1998) and articles on the construction of modern national identities, Romantic literary theory, the historical novel and Anglo-German intellectual relations.