Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities
and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned
with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was
vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany
where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of
the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings
contextual analysis and careful theoretical work Revolutionary Subjects traces the
historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices as well as the geocultural grounds against
which they unfolded in case studies of Volker Braun F.C. Delius Hans Magnus Enzensberger and
Heiner Müller. The book's cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise
engagements with the transnational historicizing critical impulses that accompany the
production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the
content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature
comparative literature and Latin American Studies.
