Author: Sinclair Lewis File Type: mobi The novel that foreshadowed Donald Trumps authoritarian appeal.Salon* It Cant Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewiss later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith*. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitlers aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press. Called a message to thinking Americans by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, It Cant Happen Here is a shockingly prescient novel that remains as fresh and contemporary as todays news. With an Introduction by Michael Meyer and an Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst **

Author: Petra S. McGillen File Type: pdf With an innovative approach that combines material media history, media theory, and literary poetics, this book reconstructs the great German writer Theodor Fontanes creative process. Petra McGillen follows Fontane into the engine room of his text production. Analyzing a wealth of unexplored archival evidence--which includes a collection of the authors 67 extant notebooks, along with an array of other paper tools, such as cardboard boxes, envelopes, and slips--McGillen demonstrates how Fontane compiled his realist prose works. That is, he assembled them from premediated sources, literally with scissors and glue, in an extraordinarily inorganic and radically intertextual manner that turned writing into a process of ongoing remix. By exploring the far-reaching implications of Fontanes creative practices for our understanding of his authorship, originality, and poetics, this book opens up a completely new way to think about his works and, by extension, 19th-century literary realism. This conceptualization of authors notebooks as creative tools makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on the history of writing media in several disciplines, from German studies and literary studies to media history, and to our understanding of the relationship between mass media and literary creativity in the late 19th century.Review Deftly combining 19th-century media history and a wealth of previously unexamined archival materials, The Fontane Workshop offers a fresh and fascinating new interpretation of a canonical author and a key moment in German literary history. Recognizing Fontane as the compiler he was not only transforms our understanding of his authorship and the sources of his unique success, but also invites us to reconsider more generally the complexities of literary production in the industrial age of print. Matt Erlin, Chair and Professor of German, Washington University in St. Louis Until now, Fontanes novels have barely ever been considered in light of the process by which they came to be written. The rubric of poetic realism defined the horizon of expectations and obscured the view of the workshop in which the work took shape. In her fascinating study, Petra McGillen now introduces us to Fontane the manufacturer, collector of cuttings, maker of lists, cut-and-paste raconteur, remix artist, and media wizard. Heike Gfrereis, Head Curator, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and Honorary Professor, University of Stuttgart, Germany Combining analytic approaches from the schools of book history, media theory, and practice-driven examinations of literary production, McGillens important study reevaluates Theodor Fontanes works by focusing on the material conditions of his writerly workshop. The book offers fascinating insights into Fontanes methods of compiling, note-taking, and collecting, all ways of gathering information that anticipate modern forms of crowd-sourcing and networking. Fontanes Realist poetics thus produce a media-based effect and reveal the modernity of 19th-century modes of writing. Anette Schwarz, Associate Professor of German Studies, Cornell University, USA About the Author Petra S. McGillen is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, USA.