TY - JOUR A1 - Waller, Nicole T1 - Marronage or underground? BT - the black geographies of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Water Dancer JF - MELUS : multi-ethnic literature of the U.S. / Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States N2 - 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. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac021 SN - 0163-755X SN - 1946-3170 VL - 47 IS - 1 SP - 45 EP - 70 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wilke, Heinrich T1 - Character and perspective in cosmic horror BT - Lovecraft and Kiernan JF - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik : a quarterly of language, literature and cultur N2 - 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. KW - cosmic horror KW - H. P. Lovecraft KW - Caitlin R. Kiernan KW - race and whiteness KW - fiction Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2021-2038 SN - 0044-2305 SN - 2196-4726 VL - 69 IS - 2 SP - 173 EP - 190 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stillmark, Hans-Christian ED - Langner, Paul Martin ED - Mirecka, Agata T1 - Perturbation als Analysemethode dramatischer Texte BT - Dramaturgien der "Störung" bei Bertolt Brecht und Heiner Müller JF - Tendenzen der zeitgenössischen Dramatik N2 - Perturbation als Analysemethode für dramatische Texte wird hier am Beispiel von Brecht und Müller ausprobiert. KW - Perturbation KW - Dramatik KW - Brecht KW - Heiner Müller Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-3-631-65597-9 SP - 11 EP - 29 PB - Lang-Ed. CY - Frankfurt, M. ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Crane, Kylie Ann T1 - Anthropocene Presences and the Limits of Deferral BT - Alexis Wright's Carpentaria and The Swan Book JF - Open library of humanities N2 - 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. Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.348 SN - 2056-6700 VL - 5 IS - 1 PB - Open library of humanities CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartung, Heike T1 - Longevity narratives BT - Darwinism and beyond JF - Journal of aging studie N2 - 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. KW - Age studies KW - Cultural studies KW - Longevity narratives KW - Evolutionary theories of ageing Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2018.03.002 SN - 0890-4065 SN - 1879-193X VL - 47 SP - 84 EP - 89 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Lottes, Günther T1 - Language and Content BT - the political thought of algernon Sidney between Republicanism and Enlightenment T2 - Perspectives on English revolutionary republicanism Y1 - 2014 SP - 53 EP - 61 PB - Ashgate CY - Farnham ER - TY - CHAP ED - Röder, Kathrin ED - Wischer, Ilse T1 - Proceedings : Anglistentag 2012 Potsdam T2 - Proceedings of the conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English Y1 - 2013 SN - 978-3-86821-488-8 VL - 34 PB - Wissenschaftlicher Verlag CY - Trier ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Peters, Arne A1 - van Hattum, Marije T1 - Pseudonyms as carriers of contextualised threat in 19th-century Irish English threatening notices JF - English world-wide : a journal of varieties of English N2 - 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. KW - pseudonyms KW - threatening communication KW - Irish English KW - persona KW - construction KW - sociocultural cognition KW - context-specificity KW - post-positioned semantic frame setters Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00059.pet SN - 0172-8865 SN - 1569-9730 VL - 42 IS - 1 SP - 29 EP - 53 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ungelenk, Johannes ED - Fluhrer, Sandra ED - Waszynski, Alexander T1 - Touching this dreaded sight BT - Die anstößige Wucht des Theaters in Shakespeares Hamlet und The Tempest JF - Tangieren : Praktiken und Arrangements des Berührens in den performativen Künsten N2 - Ausgehend von der in Shakespeare zweimal wiederkehrenden Phrase „Touching this dreaded sight“ widmet sich der Beitrag mithilfe ausgewählter Stellen aus Shakespeares Hamlet und The Tempest der Wirkkraft des frühneuzeitlichen Theaters. Er geht der Frage nach, wie Zuschauer*innen eines Stückes aus der Distanz be-troffen und ge-rührt werden. Um dem nachzudenken, wie diese Distanz zwischen dem Visuellen, dem Schauen im Theater, und dem Haptischen, der Berührung, überbrückt werden kann, helfen frühneuzeitliche Vorstellungen von theatraler Ansteckungskraft und Hans Blumenbergs Konzept menschlicher Betreffbarkeit. KW - Berühren KW - Theater KW - Blumenberg KW - Shakespeare Y1 - 2020 SN - 978-3-96821-002-5 SN - 978-3-96821-003-2 SP - 203 EP - 220 PB - Rombach CY - Freiburg i. Br. ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Wiemann, Dirk A1 - Mahlberg, Gaby A1 - Dzelzainis, Martin A1 - Cuttica, Cesare A1 - Lottes, Günther A1 - Davis, J. C. A1 - Pankratz, Anette A1 - Sedlmayr, Gerold A1 - Vallance, Edward A1 - Vanderbeke, Dirk A1 - Borot, Luc A1 - Champion, Justin A1 - Burgess, Glenn ED - Wiemann, Dirk ED - Mahlberg, Gaby T1 - Perspectives on English revolutionary republicanism N2 - Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism takes stock of developments in the scholarship of seventeenth-century English republicanism by looking at the movements and schools of thought that have shaped the field over the decades: the linguistic turn, the cultural turn and the religious turn. While scholars of seventeenth-century republicanism share their enthusiasm for their field, they have approached their subject in diverse ways. The contributors to the present volume have taken the opportunity to bring these approaches together in a number of case studies covering republican language, republican literary and political culture, and republican religion, to paint a lively picture of the state of the art in republican scholarship. The volume begins with three chapters influenced by the theory and methodology of the linguistic turn, before moving on to address cultural history approaches to English republicanism, including both literary culture and (practical) political culture. The final section of the volume looks at how religion intersected with ideas of republican thought. Taken together the essays demonstrate the vitality and diversity of what was once regarded as a narrow topic of political research. KW - Großbritannien KW - Republikanismus KW - Geschichte 1600-1700 KW - Republicanism KW - Great Britain KW - History KW - 17th century Y1 - 2014 SN - 978-1-4094-5567-7 PB - Ashgate CY - Farnham ER -