List of Figures Notes on Contributors Introduction: Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture   Thorsten Carstensen and Mattias Pirholt Part 1 The Self 1 The Freedom to Become: Henri Bergson’s Recovery of the Unquantified Self   Thomas Sutherland 2 Making the Violin Happy: A Posthumanist Analysis of the Failure of Self-Optimization in Selma Lagerlöf’s The Story of a Country House   Ann-Sofie Lönngren 3 Policing the Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction   Peter Childs Part 2 Emotions and Nerves 4 “To Win Back the Right to Great Affects!” Nietzsche, Vitalism and Self-Optimization   Paul Bishop 5 Knut Hamsun, America, and Walt Whitman: On the Use of Literary Criticism as Self-Optimization   Eirik Vassenden 6 William and Henry James, the Neurasthenic Generation, and the Quest for Illness   Wenwen Guo 7 Paul Lasker-Schüler and the Troubled Legacy of “Crip Pedagogy” at the Odenwaldschule   Gunther Martens Part 3 Body and Gender 8 Naked Triumphs and National Renewal: Heinrich Pudor and the German Life Reform Movement   Thorsten Carstensen 9 Perfect Bodies: Physical Culture and Self-Optimization in the United States Around 1900   Simon Wendt 10 “Perfection of the Life, or of the Work”: W.B. Yeats and the Struggle for Self-Optimization   Peter Liebregts 11 The Tragedy of a Woman: Alma Karlin and the Fragmented Self   Nicole Perry 12 Gender and Self-Optimization in Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi. Eine von uns and Das kunstseidene Mädchen   Brangwen Stone Part 4 The Technology of Self-Optimization 13 Planning for Success: Gustav Großmann’s Method of Self-Rationalization as an Economic Theory of Behavior   Ralph Köhnen 14 Henry Parland’s Cyborgs: The Problematic Perfection of Man   Mattias Pirholt 15 Anthropotechnik? Ernst Jünger’s Organic Constructions, Self-Optimization and Modernity   Nicholas Saul 16 Neues Bauen, Neues Wohnen: Self-Optimization through Better Architecture   Deborah Ascher Barnstone Index