Promotional Information

One of the best contributions to medieval scholarship in the past two or three decades, this book is a brilliant example of what literary history, at its very best, is capable of being. Muller is one of the most intellectually productive living medievalists. The undogmatic complexity of his thinking is always surprising and inspiring; the profundity of his scholarship is simply beyond belief. This volume represents both a monumental work, a future classic, and a breakthrough intellectual achievement. -- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

Table of Contents

Preface to the English Translation
Preface
Introduction
1. Variations of the Legend
2. Heroic Narration and Epic Composition
3. Nibelungian Society
4. Nibelungian Anthropology
5. The Shrouding of Visibility
6. Spaces
7. Disrupted Rules of Interaction
8. The Failure of the Courtly Alternative
9. Deconstructing the Nibelungian World
Notes
Works Cited
Index

About the Author

Jan-Dirk Muller is a professor at the Institute for German Philology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich. William T. Whobrey is a lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University and an assistant dean of Yale College.

Reviews

Muller's argumentation is thorough and his endnotes and bibliography are expansive; Whobrey's translation flows. Choice It is an exceptional treat that Johns Hopkins University Press has translated from German into English one of the most important, ground-breaking books on medieval studies of the past decade... Mueller offers a new reading of one of the major canonical texts of German medieval literature but also pioneers an innovative approach to medieval texts in general. -- Bettina Bildhauer Times Literary Supplement Jan-Dirk Muller's ground-breaking and controversial study of the Nibelungenlied... is an important book for medieval studies, and it is greatly to be welcomed that it is now available in an American translation and thus accessible to a larger audience. -- Almut Suerbaum Modern Language Review This is literary scholarship of a very high order indeed, and Muller's methods of reading a text can, I believe, be very illuminating to scholars in other areas beyond Germanic languages and literatures. -- Shami Ghosh H-German, H-Net Reviews