Professor Robert Vilain
College Lecturer, Christ Church
Professor of German, University of Bristol (from Sept 2010)
Address: Christ Church, Oxford, OX1 1DP
Email: robert.vilain@chch.ox.ac.uk
Tel: 01865 286336
Research
Robert Vilain specializes in German, Austrian, French and Comparative Literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a special interest in lyric poetry. He has published widely on authors such as Hofmannsthal, George, Rilke, Yvan and Claire Goll, Thomas Mann, on Franco-German literary relations, detective fiction and the relationship of literature and music. He has been joint editor of the journal Austrian Studies since 2003 and co-edited the first volume of the new journal, Edinburgh German Yearbook, in 2007.
Teaching
German literature from the 18th century to the present day, particularly poetry, Modernism, Expressionism, the Weimar Republic, Mann, Brecht, Grass. Professor Vilain does not supervise postgraduate students for the University of Oxford but welcomes applications from potential research students for places in Bristol.
Selected Publications
Editor, Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, translated by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland (OUP, 2011; forthcoming)
Editor, with Karen Leeder, The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (CUP, 2010)
Editor, with Karen Leeder, Nach Duino: Studien zu Rainer Maria Rilkes späten Gedichten (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010)
'Tragedy and the Apostle of Beauty: The Early Literary Reception of Oscar Wilde in Germany and Austria', in The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe, ed. Stefano-Maria Evangelista (London & New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 173-88
'Trakl and Symbolism', in Martin Liebscher, Ben Schofield and Godela Weiss-Sussex (eds), The Racehorse of Genius: Literary and Cultural Comparisons, London German Studies, 12 (Munich: Iudicium, 2009), pp. 83-101
'An Englishman Abroad: Literature, Politics and Sex in John Lehmann's Writings on Vienna in the 1930s', in Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman (eds), Interwar Vienna (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2009), pp. 246-66
'Images of Optimism? Illustrated Editions of Voltaire’s Candide in the Context of the First World War', Oxford German Studies, 37.2 (2008), 227-56
'"Maske des Lächelns": Voltaire und der deutsche Expressionismus', in Frankreich und der deutsche Expressionismus / France and German Expressionism, ed. Frank Krause (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2008), pp. 115-40
'“Le style, c’est le diable”: German Poetry in Dialogue with Paul Valéry', German Life and Letters, 60.3 (2007), 298-314
With Andreas Kramer, Yvan Goll: A Bibliography of the Primary Works, British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature, 26 (Berne, etc.: Lang, 2006)
'Stefan George: Early Works 1890-1895’, in A Companion to the Works of Stefan George, ed. Jens Rieckmann (Columbia: Camden House, 2005), pp. 51-77
'The “Pierrot Lunaire” poems by Giraud and Hartleben and Schoenberg’s Selections: Random Collections or Cycles?', in Pierrot Lunaire: Albert Giraud, Otto Erich Hartleben, Arnold Schoenberg: Une Collection D’Etudes Musico-Littéraires, ed. Mark Delaere & Jan Herman (Louvain: Peeters, 2004), 127-44
'Hofmannsthal and Celan', Austrian Studies, 12 (2004), 172-95
'Bringing the Villains to Book: Balzac and Hoffmann as Antecedents of the Modern Detective Story', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 84.3 (2002), 105-24
Editor, with Warren Chernaik & Martin Swales, The Art of Detective Fiction (London: Macmillan, 2000)
'Schoenberg and German Poetry', in Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years, ed. Charlotte M. Cross & Russell A. Bermann (New York: Garland, 2000), 1-30
The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
With Geoffrey Chew, 'Evasive Realism: Narrative Construction in Dostoevsky’s and Janácek’s “From the House of the Dead”', in Janácek Studies, ed. Paul Wingfield (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56-78
Editor, with Eric Robertson, Yvan Goll – Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997)