Martin Travers Livres

Critics of Modernity provides the fullest account in English of the work of a series of writers who were of crucial importance to the formation and dissemination of a trenchant ethos of national revivalism in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In cultural terms that ethos was every bit as powerful as the prevailing discourse of Modernism, bringing within its sway figures as diverse as Hermann Löns, Hans Grimm, Ernst Jünger, Stefan George, Arnolt Bronnen, Ernst von Salomon, and Gottfried Benn. Disparate as they were in their aesthetic aims and priorities, these writers shared a thorough rejection of the values and institutions of the modern world, whose perceived evils they sought to remove through that most paradoxical of all political a conservative revolution. This study examines in detail both the literature of these authors and the varied intellectual contexts that gave their writing its ideological momentum.

Saicrets? Aye. We hae saicrets. Leadhills, August 1803. Dorothy Wordsworth seeks shelter in a humble lodging house and discovers something no outsider was ever meant to see. Accompanying her famous brother on a bracing tour of Scotland, she's eager to collect blood-curdling myths, legends and curiosities. The poisonous Grey Glen, where animals run mad and miners convulse, fascinates her as much as the progressive library they've travelled so far to visit. But as her landlady rants and the curfew bell tolls, Dorothy realises things beyond imagination are unburying themselves. If she listens closely, this place will give up its dark secrets. From Martin Travers, the award-winning writer of Scarfed for Life and The Kids are Alt Right, comes the magical and mysterious Secret Wrapped in Lead, an unmissable piece of Scots language theatre. This edition was published to coincide with the Braw Clan tour in July 2023.

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find new words for his radical form of philosophy. This book is the first study that provides a full account of Heidegger's language and writing style, revealing his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about his philosophical quest.

The Hour That Breaks is the first biography of Gottfried Benn to appear in English. The author of this study charts in impressive detail the complex paths of Benn’s life, through the demands of his medical practice and military involvement in two world wars, his brief political advocacy of Hitler and Nazism in 1933, to his final «comeback» in post Second World War Germany. The author also engages with Benn’s extensive body of poetry which, inventive, challenging and formally wrought, was the product of mind that was both radical and conservative. The same propensity to invention and transformation also informed Benn’s personal and professional life, giving rise to a practice of role-playing and dissimulation that the poet termed a «double life». As Travers shows in this well-written and informative biography, this was a strategy of survival of which Benn, ultimately, was as much the victim as the master. This biography also offers fresh translations of many of Benn’s poems, a number of which appear here in English for the first time.

This book is the first comprehensive study of Gottfried Benn’s poetry to appear in English. It covers the entirety of Benn’s verse, from his early Morgue cycle (1912) and Expressionist poems through to the «anthropological» poetry of his middle period to the «postmodern» Phase II work after the Second World War. Against the background of the poet’s theoretical writings, this study, drawing upon the classic texts of Benn scholarship, analyzes in detail the major themes of his verse and its distinctive idiom. In particular, this work focuses on Gottfried Benn’s extended process of rhetorical self-fashioning, his use of classical iconography, color motifs and chiffres, his often confusing historical semantics, the seemingly self-constituting «absolute» poem, and the colloquial idiom of his late verse. The book also engages with the multiplicity of voices in Benn’s work and their varied textual forms, the hermeneutically variable positions of speech that they articulate and the often contradictory notion of selfhood to which they give rise.