The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond

Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen

Dedalus, 2001 - Art - 175 pages

This textbook presents in a unified manner the fundamentals of both continuous and discrete versions of the Fourier and Laplace transforms. These transforms play an important role in the analysis of all kinds of physical phenomena. As a link between the various applications of these transforms the authors use the theory of signals and systems, as well as the theory of ordinary and partial differential equations. The book is divided into four major parts: periodic functions and Fourier series, non-periodic functions and the Fourier integral, switched-on signals and the Laplace transform, and finally the discrete versions of these transforms, in particular the Discrete Fourier Transform together with its fast implementation, and the z-transform. This textbook is designed for self-study. It includes many worked examples, together with more than 120 exercises, and will be of great value to undergraduates and graduate students in applied mathematics, electrical engineering, physics and computer science.

Contents

• Section 1: 7

About the author

A popular didactic novel of the Reformation period, Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (Adventures of a Simpleton) (1669) is largely responsible for establishing the novel as an important genre in German literature. It is an early example of the picaresque genre. The hero of the novel, who shares some of his creator's adventures, is no conventional "fool" reflecting on the follies of mankind, but a real soldier of fortune in the Thirty Years War. The misery he experiences forces him to search for an answer to the riddle of human existence. One of the sequels to Simplicissimus is Landstortzerin Courasche (1669), a bawdy, picaresque tale of a woman camp follower in an ugly world, "a symbol of the age and a lively individual [who] comes out on top in any situation with unimpaired self-assurance if not virtue" (LJ). The False Messiah (1672), in which a thief poses as the Prophet Elijah, "paints an equally grotesque picture of the world" (SR). Drawing a parallel between the devastation experienced in Germany during the Thirty Years War and during World War II, Gunter Grass found the work of Grimmelshausen a great source of inspiration. The combination of earnest moralism and cynicism renders the work of Grimmelshausen relatively modern, and it is open to a very wide range of interpretations.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Life of Courage: The Notorious Thief, Whore, and Vagabond; Dedalus European classics
• Author: Hans Jakob Christoph von Grimmelshausen
• Editor: Mike Mitchell (Translator)
• Translated by: Mike Mitchell (Translator)
• Publisher: Dedalus, 2001
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Mar 20, 2008
• ISBN: 1873982569, 9781873982563
• Length: 175 pages
• Subjects: Art / General; Fiction / Classics; Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary