TY - JOUR A1 - Lampart, Fabian T1 - 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 JF - Studi Germanici Y1 - 2023 UR - https://www.studigermanici.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/SG23_Osservatorio.pdf SN - 0039-2952 VL - 2023 IS - 23 SP - 289 EP - 291 PB - Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici CY - Rome ER - 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 - 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 - THES A1 - Behrendt, Aileen Jorena T1 - Gender Politics and British Women Writers of the 1930s BT - Dynamic Stasis in the Novels of Nancy Mitford, Stevie Smith, Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys T2 - Epistemata : Würzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften. Reihe Literaturwissenschaft N2 - 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 cliché 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. Y1 - 2020 SN - 978-3-8260-7177-5 SN - 2699-5859 N1 - Winner of the Gender Award of the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Potsdam in 2019. IS - 937 PB - Königshausen & Neumann CY - Würzburg 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 - GEN A1 - Reimer, Anna Maria T1 - Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Discursive Constructions of Identity and Alterity in British Orient Travelogues / [reviewed by] Anna Maria Reimer T1 - Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur / [rezensiert von] Anna Maria Reimer T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe N2 - Rezensiertes Werk Pink, Katharina, Identitas Oriens: Diskursive Konstruktionen von Identität und Alterität in britischer Orient-Reiseliteratur - Würzburg, Ergon Verlag, 2014 337 S. - (Literatur - Kultur - Theorie, 19) T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe - 126 Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397856 SN - 1866-8380 IS - 126 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Adair, Gigi T1 - The “Feringhi Hakīm”: medical encounters and colonial ambivalence in Isabella Bird’s travels in Japan and Persia T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe N2 - 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. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe - 120 KW - Isabella Bird KW - medicine KW - travel KW - gender KW - colonialism KW - missionaries KW - Japan KW - Persia Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-395316 SN - 1866-8380 IS - 120 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Röder, Katrin T1 - Engaging with T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets as a Multimedia Performance T2 - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik N2 - This article explores a recent performance of excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935/36–1942) entitled Engaging Eliot: Four Quartets in Word, Color, and Sound as an example of live poetry. In this context, Eliot’s poem can be analysed as an auditory artefact that interacts strongly with other oral performances (welcome addresses and artists’ conversations), as well as with the musical performance of Christopher Theofanidis’s quintet “At the Still Point” at the end of the opening of Engaging Eliot. The event served as an introduction to a 13-day art exhibition and engaged in a re-evaluation of Eliot’s poem after 9/11: while its first part emphasises the connection between Eliot’s poem and Christian doctrine, its second part – especially the combination of poetry reading and musical performance – highlights the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of Four Quartets. Y1 - 2017 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-397808 ER -