Overview

Between the Kaiser's and Hitler's Reichs, the genre of die Groteske, or the German literary grotesque, sold out cabarets, drew droves of radio listeners, and created bestsellers with its irreverent comedy and critique. At the same time, its authors were ruthlessly censored for their satire of society, leaving die Groteske virtually unknown today. As the first full-length study of the genre, Animal, Vegetal, Marginal recovers this short prose form, which draws on the perspectives of marginalized animals, plants, and individuals to challenge what it means to be human. Author Joela Jacobs traces the development of the genre and its variations from the work of Oskar Panizza, Hanns Heinz Ewers, and Salomo Friedlaender to Franz Kafka. Animal, Vegetal, Marginal shows how marginalized and nonhuman voices mounted resistance against the rise of the biopolitical structures underpinning nationalism, racism, and antisemitism in the decades leading up to the Second World War.

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9780253071972

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Reviews

""The first monograph to focus on the neglected genre of the German literary grotesque, this book offers a timely account of the rise and fall of a genre through which modernist writers satirized the infusion of nationalism, racism, and antisemitism so effectively that they in turn became targets of such virulent persecution that the genre remained virtually unstudied until now. Reading canonical luminaries like Franz Kafka alongside more notorious contemporaries like Oskar Panizza, Joela Jacobs pieces together an astonishing case study of how a literary form that gives voice to marginalized and nonhuman perspectives helps to expose the dangers of normalizing social oppression. In addition to being a major contribution to German studies, the book is groundbreaking for interweaving insights from literary, plant, and animal studies, and as such extends the innovative interdisciplinary research program that secures Jacobs's international reputation as a rising star.""—Susan McHugh, author of Love in the Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction ""Animal, Vegetal, Marginal salvages a censored and forgotten short form whose irreverent exaggerations functioned as a fierce social critique in the first decades of the twentieth century. Across a series of engaging close readings, Jacobs carefully identifies the critical potential of these nightmarish narratives for their time—and ours. Equipped with ecocritical insights into the significance of the more-than-human world, Jacobs dives deep into these vivid depictions of vegetal eroticism, canine narrators, and other monsters who challenge normative accounts of the human. What emerges is a comprehensive historical study of a genre whose unrelenting exposure of structures of biopolitical regulation demands renewed attention today. As the first monograph on this genre of the grotesque, Animal, Vegetal, Marginal is an event within modernist literary studies; what makes it equally eventful for animal studies, plant studies, and critical gender and sexuality studies is that it also opens important lines of inquiry into issues of belonging, kinship, and sexuality in a more-than-human world.""—Jason Groves, author of The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

Author Information

Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research engages with plants, animals, the environment, Jewish identity, science, gender, and sexuality in Germanophone literature and culture since the nineteenth century. She cofounded and maintains the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network.

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