What role do emotions play in German literary works

Emotions play a crucial and multifaceted role in German literary works across different periods and genres. They function as central elements in character development, narrative style, thematic exploration, and cultural representation. In German literature, emotions are not only portrayed through direct description but also through linguistic and stylistic devices such as metaphor, somatic phraseologisms, and paralinguistic elements, which enrich the emotional depth and resonance of the texts.

Emotions serve several purposes in German literary works:

• They are integral to exploring human experiences and social identities, such as in the emotional communities formed by early German women students or the affective narratives during political and social movements.
• In poetry, emotions are evoked both by content and form, contributing to the aesthetic and affective impact.
• German Romanticism and subsequent literary movements emphasize emotional expression as a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, highlighting themes like longing (Sehnsucht), love, pride, and sorrow.
• Emotional expression is also deeply tied to cultural and political discourse, where emotions verbalized through literature reflect and shape collective memory, identity, and social consciousness.

Moreover, contemporary German literature and fiction frequently utilize emotionally charged idioms and stylistic means to efficiently convey complex affective states, making emotions a key stylistic and narrative tool. Literary texts in German help foster emotional understanding, empathy, and motivation in readers, contributing to both individual and collective development.

In summary, emotions in German literary works are essential for their artistic expression, cultural significance, and social function, spanning from historical contexts to modern narrative strategies and linguistic creativity. ^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}

References

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• Feeling Doctrine: Religious Meanings of Emotion in Sixteenth-Century German Literature

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• Application Perspectives of Corpus-Based Methods Within Linguo-Cultural and Psycholinguistic Analysis: German Emotional Concept “Sehnsucht”

• Communication of Emotions by Characters in a Flash Fiction (Based on Short Stories by Thomas Mann)

• Intimacy and Resonance: Visions of Love in Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s Liebesnähe and Ronja von Rönne’s Wir kommen

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• The Role of Ecb Speeches in Nowcasting German Gdp

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• Book Review: The Social Nature of Emotion Expression: What Emotions Can Tell Us About the World