@misc{Lampart2023, author = {Lampart, Fabian}, title = {Rezension zu: Per un atlante geostorico della letteratura tedesca (1900-1930) / Hrsg.: Francesco Fiorentino, Milena Massalongo, Gianluca Paolucci. - Roma: Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, 2021. - 326 S. - ISBN: 978-88-95868-56-1}, series = {Studi Germanici}, volume = {2023}, journal = {Studi Germanici}, number = {23}, publisher = {Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici}, address = {Rome}, issn = {0039-2952}, pages = {289 -- 291}, year = {2023}, language = {en} } @article{Waller2022, author = {Waller, Nicole}, title = {Marronage or underground?}, series = {MELUS : multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. / Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States}, volume = {47}, journal = {MELUS : multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. / Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States}, number = {1}, publisher = {Oxford Univ. Press}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0163-755X}, doi = {10.1093/melus/mlac021}, pages = {45 -- 70}, year = {2022}, abstract = {I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and "thinking otherwise" about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being "above" and "below" the land while affirming African American connectedness to place.}, language = {en} } @article{Wilke2021, author = {Wilke, Heinrich}, title = {Character and perspective in cosmic horror}, series = {Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Anglistik und Amerikanistik : a quarterly of language, literature and cultur}, volume = {69}, journal = {Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Anglistik und Amerikanistik : a quarterly of language, literature and cultur}, number = {2}, publisher = {De Gruyter}, address = {Berlin}, issn = {0044-2305}, doi = {10.1515/zaa-2021-2038}, pages = {173 -- 190}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Despite their overt focus on inexplicable alien forces, cosmic horror stories are also determined by their human cast. Far from being merely fodder for horror, the characters significantly contribute to the generation of meaning, including that of the supernatural entity or phenomenon itself. The same holds for the narrators' (implicitly) political perspectives on the world of which they are part. Much of the perspective propounded in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories partakes of myth, adopting in particular the latter's universal view and pronounced sidelining of humanity as a whole, which it intensifies to the point of horror. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this universal perspective is consistent with the racism permeating and structuring Lovecraft's writing. Though eschewing racism and universalism, the cosmic horror of Kiernan's "Tidal Forces" negotiates literary reflections of colonialism from an unreflective white perspective.}, language = {en} } @article{PetersvanHattum2021, author = {Peters, Arne and van Hattum, Marije}, title = {Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices}, series = {English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English}, volume = {42}, journal = {English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English}, number = {1}, publisher = {John Benjamins Publishing Co.}, address = {Amsterdam}, issn = {0172-8865}, doi = {10.1075/eww.00059.pet}, pages = {29 -- 53}, year = {2021}, abstract = {This paper explores functions of pseudonyms in written threatening communication from a cognitive sociolinguistic perspective. It addresses the semantic domains present in pseudonyms in a corpus of 19th-century Irish English threatening notices and their cognitive functions in the construction of both cultural-contextualised threat and the threatener's identity. We identify eight semantic domains that are accessed recurrently in order to create threat. Contributing to the notion of threat involves menacing war, violence, darkness and perdition directly, while also constructing a certain persona for the threatener that highlights their motivation, moral superiority, historical, local and circumstantial expertise, and their physical and mental aptitude. We argue that pseudonyms contribute to the deontic force of the threat by accessing cultural categories and schemas as well as conceptual metaphors and metonymies. Finally, we suggest that pseudonyms function as post-positioned semantic frame setters, providing a cognitive lens through which the entire threatening notice must be interpreted.}, language = {en} } @article{Ungelenk2020, author = {Ungelenk, Johannes}, title = {Touching this dreaded sight}, series = {Tangieren : Praktiken und Arrangements des Ber{\"u}hrens in den performativen K{\"u}nsten}, journal = {Tangieren : Praktiken und Arrangements des Ber{\"u}hrens in den performativen K{\"u}nsten}, editor = {Fluhrer, Sandra and Waszynski, Alexander}, publisher = {Rombach}, address = {Freiburg i. Br.}, isbn = {978-3-96821-002-5}, pages = {203 -- 220}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Ausgehend von der in Shakespeare zweimal wiederkehrenden Phrase „Touching this dreaded sight" widmet sich der Beitrag mithilfe ausgew{\"a}hlter Stellen aus Shakespeares Hamlet und The Tempest der Wirkkraft des fr{\"u}hneuzeitlichen Theaters. Er geht der Frage nach, wie Zuschauer*innen eines St{\"u}ckes aus der Distanz be-troffen und ge-r{\"u}hrt werden. Um dem nachzudenken, wie diese Distanz zwischen dem Visuellen, dem Schauen im Theater, und dem Haptischen, der Ber{\"u}hrung, {\"u}berbr{\"u}ckt werden kann, helfen fr{\"u}hneuzeitliche Vorstellungen von theatraler Ansteckungskraft und Hans Blumenbergs Konzept menschlicher Betreffbarkeit.}, language = {de} } @phdthesis{Behrendt2020, author = {Behrendt, Aileen Jorena}, title = {Gender Politics and British Women Writers of the 1930s}, series = {Epistemata : W{\"u}rzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften. Reihe Literaturwissenschaft}, journal = {Epistemata : W{\"u}rzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften. Reihe Literaturwissenschaft}, number = {937}, publisher = {K{\"o}nigshausen \& Neumann}, address = {W{\"u}rzburg}, isbn = {978-3-8260-7177-5}, issn = {2699-5859}, pages = {298}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Today's focus on the 1930s as a time of radical politics paving the way for the apocalypse of the Second World War ignores the complexity of the decade's cultural responses, especially those by British women writers who highlighted gender issues within their contemporary political climate. The decade's literature is often understood to capture the political unrest, either narrating people's chaotic movement or their paralysed shock. This book argues that 1930s novels collapse the distinction between movement and standstill and calls this phenomenon Dynamic Stasis. This Dynamic Stasis thematically and structurally informs the novels of Nancy Mitford, Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys. By disrupting the oft-repeated clich{\´e} of the 1930s as the age of political extremes, gender politics and negotiations of femininity can emerge from the discursive periphery. This book therefore corrects a persistent gender blind spot, which opens up a (re)consideration of authors that have been overlooked in literary criticism of 1930s to this day.}, language = {en} } @article{Crane2019, author = {Crane, Kylie Ann}, title = {Anthropocene Presences and the Limits of Deferral}, series = {Open library of humanities}, volume = {5}, journal = {Open library of humanities}, number = {1}, publisher = {Open library of humanities}, address = {Cambridge}, issn = {2056-6700}, doi = {10.16995/olh.348}, pages = {24}, year = {2019}, abstract = {Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a 'crisis of imagination' (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate.}, language = {en} } @article{Hartung2018, author = {Hartung, Heike}, title = {Longevity narratives}, series = {Journal of aging studie}, volume = {47}, journal = {Journal of aging studie}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {New York}, issn = {0890-4065}, doi = {10.1016/j.jaging.2018.03.002}, pages = {84 -- 89}, year = {2018}, abstract = {The essay looks at longevity narratives as an important configuration of old age, which is closely related to evolutionary theories of ageing. In order to analyse two case studies of longevity published in the early twentieth century, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall's book Senescence (1922) and the British dramatist Bernard Shaw's play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921), the essay draws on an outline of theories of longevity from the Enlightenment to the present. The analysis of the two case studies illustrates that evolutionary and cultural perspectives on ageing and longevity are ambivalent and problematic. In Hall's and Shaw's texts this is related to a crisis narrative of culture and civilization against which both writers place their specific solutions of individual and species longevity. Whereas Hall employs autobiographical accounts of artists as examples of longevity to strengthen his argument about wise old men as exclusive repositories of knowledge, Shaw in his vision of longevity as an extended form of midlife for both genders encounters the limits of age representation.}, language = {en} } @misc{Reimer2017, author = {Reimer, Anna Maria}, title = {Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Discursive Constructions of Identity and Alterity in British Orient Travelogues / [reviewed by] Anna Maria Reimer}, series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe}, journal = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe}, number = {126}, issn = {1866-8380}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397856}, pages = {3}, year = {2017}, abstract = {Rezensiertes Werk Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identit{\"a}t und Alterit{\"a}t in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur - W{\"u}rzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2014 337 S. - (Literatur - Kultur - Theorie, 19)}, language = {en} } @misc{Adair2017, author = {Adair, Gigi}, title = {The "Feringhi Hakīm": medical encounters and colonial ambivalence in Isabella Bird's travels in Japan and Persia}, series = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe}, journal = {Postprints der Universit{\"a}t Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe}, number = {120}, issn = {1866-8380}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-395316}, pages = {13}, year = {2017}, abstract = {This article considers Isabella Bird's representation of medicine in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) and Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), the two books in which she engages most extensively with both local (Chinese/Islamic) and Western medical science and practice. I explore how Bird uses medicine to assert her narrative authority and define her travelling persona in opposition to local medical practitioners. I argue that her ambivalence and the unease she frequently expresses concerning medical practice (expressed particularly in her later adoption of the Persian appellation "Feringhi Hakīm" [European physician] to describe her work) serves as a means for her to negotiate the colonial and gendered pressures on Victorian medicine. While in Japan this attitude works to destabilise her hierarchical understanding of science and results in some acknowledgement of traditional Japanese traditions, in Persia it functions more to disguise her increasing collusion with overt British colonial ambitions.}, language = {en} }