Errata slip inserted.

Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material / Mary Fulbrook -- Introduction: The Character and Limits of the Civilizing Process / Mary Fulbrook -- Laughter and the Process of Civilization in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival / Sebastian Coxon -- (Un-)Civilized Language: The Regulation of Cursing and Swearing in German through the Ages. / Geraldine Horan -- Civilization, Un-civilization, Transgression On Goethe's Faust / Martin Swales -- The Pre-Colonial Imagination: Race and Revolution in Literature of the Napoleonic Period / Susanne Kord -- Violence and Civilization: Transgression in Modern Wars / Mark Hewitson -- Civilization in the Dining Room: Table Manners in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks / Ernest Schonfield -- The Civilizing Process and the Construction of the Bourgeois Self: Music Chambers in Wilhelmine Germany / Maiken Umbach -- Norbert Elias, the Confusions of Törlefi and the Ethics of Shamelessness / Stephanie Bird -- Bodily Issues: The West German Anti-Authoritarian Movement and the Semiotics of Dirt / Mererid Puw Davies -- Changing States, Changing Selves: Generations in the Third Reich and the GDR / Mary Fulbrook -- List of Illustrations / Mary Fulbrook.

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The collapse of the supposedly ‘civilized’ German nation into the ‘barbarism’ of Hitler’s Third Reich has cast a long shadow over interpretations of German culture and society. In the remarkable work of Norbert Elias, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, a deep concern with the distinctiveness of ‘the Germans’ is linked with an ambitious attempt to work out more general relations between broad historical processes – patterns of state formation, changing social structures – and the character of the individual self, as evidenced in changing thresholds of shame and embarrassment. In critical engagement with Elias’s notion of the ‘civilizing process’, the essays collected here explore moments of excess and transgression, moments when the very boundaries of ‘civilization’ are both constructed and challenged. Inter-disciplinary contributions – on topics ranging from medieval laughter, cursing and swearing, through to music, the bourgeois self, and aspects of modern violence – highlight the complexity of inter-relations between the individual imagination and creativity, on the one hand, and the brute facts of political power and social structural inequalities, on the other; and develop new insights into the changing patterns of culture and society in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present.