My dissertation examines Anna Seghers's encounter with China and how this encounter influenced her life and her writing. By using materials available in the Anna-Seghers-Archive in Berlin, results of studies in various related disciplines such as sinology, history, and political science, etc., as well as historical and current Chinese sources, this dissertation seeks to reconstruct chronologically Anna Seghers's intellectual involvement with China.My research traces Seghers' encounter with China back to her study of Chinese language and culture at the University of Heidelberg and her internship in the East Asian Art Museum in Cologne in the early 1920s. It illustrates that her early fascination with the cultural and political developments in China and her personal contact with several Chinese political refugees in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s were essential for her intellectual involvement with China over the following 50 years. As the first comprehensive study of its kind, this dissertation seeks to fill a void surrounding current research on Anna Seghers. The study will produce meaningful connections between Seghers' intellectual pathways and literary activities as they intertwine with the writer's encounter with another culture and nation. Findings from my research will inform future studies in contextualizing Seghers' works within various cultural paradigms that played a role in the eventful career of the most prominent German woman writer of the twentieth century.

While the “space” of modernism is traditionally associated with the metropolis, this approach leaves unaddressed a significant body of work that stresses non-urban settings. Rather than simply assuming these spaces to be the opposite of the modern city, my project rejects the empty term space and instead examines topographies, literally meaning the writing of place. Less an examination of passive settings, the study of topography in modernism explores the action of creating spaces—either real or fictional which intersect with a variety of cultural, social, historical, and often political reverberations. The combination of charged elements coalesce and form a strong visual, corporeal, and sensory-filled topography that becomes integral to understanding not only the text and its importance beyond literary studies. My study pairs four modernists—two writing in German and two in English: Joseph Conrad and Anna Seghers and James Joyce and Uwe Johnson. All writers, having experienced displacement through exile, used topographies in their narratives to illustrate not only their understanding of history and humanity, but they also wrote narratives which concerned a larger global culture. Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1900) and his Lord Jim (1904) compare to Seghers' Transit (1944) and Revolt of the Fisherman from St. Barbara (1928) in that each explores crises of modernity. Instead of using the city, Conrad and Seghers utilize the sea, the harbor, and marginalized communities to illustrate thresholds of historical crises. The topographies echo a world affected by imperialism and particularly for Seghers, fascism. In my analysis of Joyce's Ulysses (1921) and Johnson's Anniversaries (1970-83), I steer away from a traditional examination of the classic modernist city narrative. I show how the texts provide a broader and more encompassing look of the modern world through the memory of imperialism and fascism as it is reflected from outside the city limits, most notably on the coa (open full item for complete abstract)