Litteraturstudier: fra 1900 til 2000

Wenngleich der Forschungsstand, wenn es sich um die intendierte Textaussage des Musil¿schen ¿uvre handelt, durch das Fehlen einer Opinio communis gekennzeichnet ist, tritt die vorliegende Studie den Beweis an, dass eine ebensolche freizulegen ist. In Musils Opus magnum laufen die konzeptionellen Fäden zusammen, die bereits in seinem ersten Roman angelegt sind. In seiner trieb-teleologischen Skepsis beschäftigte ihn die Realisierbarkeit eines neuen Menschentypus ¿ eines Mannes ohne Eigenschaften ¿, dessen Zweck darin bestanden hätte, dem Zueilen auf den großen Weltuntergang etwas von seiner Dynamik zu nehmen und möglichen Großkonflikten so vorzubeugen. Denn die Freud¿sche Triebskepsis, die Musil früh zu eigen war, wurde zu seinem treuen weltanschaulichen Begleiter und gewann von Werk zu Werk an geschichtlicher Schärfe.

Ferdinand von Schirach war lange Strafverteidiger, bevor er mit dem Erzählband Verbrechen einen sensationellen Debüterfolg feierte. Seither hat er ein umfangreiches und vielfältiges literarisches Werk veröffentlicht. Mit über 10 Millionen verkauften Büchern und Übersetzungen in über 40 Ländern gehört Schirach zu den meistgelesenen deutschen Gegenwartsautoren. Wie erklärt sich dieser Erfolg? Was zeichnet seine Texte aus, ästhetisch, diskursiv und politisch? Die im vorliegenden Band versammelten Beiträge untersuchen Schirachs Werk aus literatur-, kultur- und rechtswissenschaftlicher Perspektive: seine Poetik, seine Medien und vor allem seine Verbindung von Literatur und Recht.

The book contains contributions on the significance of German culture for Romanian art, language, and literature. Not only will the direct influence of German role models on Romanian culture be discussed, but it will also show how this influence set in motion a whole series of socio-cultural and artistic shifts that allowed Romanian culture to better understand its position in the European world.Das Buch enthält Beiträge zur Bedeutung der deutschen Kultur für die rumänische Kunst, Sprache und Literatur. Erörtert wird nicht nur der direkte Einfluss deutscher Vorbilder auf die rumänische Kultur, sondern es wird auch aufgezeigt, wie dieser Einfluss eine ganze Reihe soziokultureller und künstlerischer Veränderungen in Gang gesetzt hat, die der rumänischen Kultur ermöglichten, ihren Platz in der europäischen Welt besser zu verstehen.

This book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ¿literary capitals¿ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ¿semi-peripheral¿ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times.

This book compares the Victorian British poet Robert Browning and the twentieth-century Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing¿two writers whose texts frequently foreground multi-scalar transregional cartographies, points of connection and translation, and imaginative kinships between different linguistic and cultural communities. Starting from the numerous and surprising points of connection and resemblance between both authors¿ texts, this book puts pressure on critical practices that would keep writers like Laing and Browning separate, positing instead the importance of paying attention to the transnational, cross-cultural, and cross-temporal imaginative relationships texts themselves generate. By comparing two writers whose texts represent different points of view on a number of shared and congruent contexts, this book seeks an original way of understanding the relationship between texts and (post-) colonial contexts, texts and other texts. Browning¿s and Laing¿s shared tendencyto foreground trans- and post-national cartographies of relation and difference, and their similarly translational aesthetics, both demand a probing of the disciplinary separation between ¿English Literature¿ and ¿Comparative Literature¿, as well as ¿literature¿ and ¿comparison¿, and a fresh awareness of the ways in which literature itself makes comparisons and affiliations. It also involves a version of ¿world literature¿ intent on accentuating the relational worlds (linguistic, imaginative, ethical) that texts themselves generate; a criticism sensitive to the ways in which writers from different times and places can still be seen to overlap.

Brings together and makes available in English for the first time some of Ángel Rama's most important essays.

The beginning of the 21st century saw the rise of "New" Atheism and a resulting conflict with Theists ¿ at the same time as the resurgence of fantasy in popular culture. This volume analyses the impact of Theist and Atheist thought on the narratology of four highly popular works of contemporary fantastic fiction. In doing so, the work demonstrates how the ideological stances and the associated patterns of thought colour the novels¿ stylistic and narrative devices. The book also presents a new conditional genre metric that not only helps overcome previous impasses within fantastic genre categories but also allows insight into the aforementioned patterns of Atheist and Theist thinking.

Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis connects insights from the field of literary animal studies with the urgent issues of climate change and environmental degradation, and features considerations of new interventions by literature in relation to these pressing questions and debates. This volume informs academic debates in terms of how nonhuman animals figure in our cultural imagination of topics such as climate change, extinction, animal otherness, the posthuman, and environmental crises. Using a diverse set of methodologies, each chapter presents relevant cases which discuss the various aspects of these interstices. This volume is an intersection between literary animal studies and climate fiction intended as an interdisciplinary intervention that speaks to the global climate debate and is thus relevant across the environmental humanities.

This volume explores how Latin American and Latinx creators have engaged science fiction to explore posthumanist thought. Contributors reflect on how Latin American and Latinx speculative art conceptualizes the operations of other, non-human forms of agency, and engages in environmentalist theory in ways that are estranging and open to new forms of species companionship. Essays cover literature, film, TV shows, and music, grouped in three sections: "e;Posthumanist Subjects"e; examines Latin(x) American iterations of some of the most common figurations of the posthuman, such as the cyborg and virtual environments and selves; "e;Slow Violence and Environmental Threats"e; understands that posthumanist meditations in the hemisphere take place in a material and cultural context shaped by the catastrophic destruction of the environment; the chapters in "e;Posthumanist Others"e; shows how the reimagination of the self and the world that posthumanism offers may be an opportunity to break the hold that oppressive systems have over the ways in which societies are constructed and governed.

Im Zentrum der Werke Stefan Zweigs und Franz Werfels stehen vielfach jene Katastrophen, die in den Schrecken der beiden Weltkriege kulminierten. Um ihre eigene Zeit zu deuten, richteten die beiden österreichisch-jüdischen Schriftsteller den Blick auf den Propheten Jeremia, der einst den Untergang der Stadt Jerusalem und die Zerstörung des Tempels verkündete. Neben einer historischen Kontextualisierung zeichnet Lukas Pallitsch das Nachleben des Propheten Jeremia in den Dichtungen von Zweig und Werfel nach und verdeutlicht, wie dessen unheimliche und tragische Züge auf verschiedenen Diskursfeldern wirksam werden - in der Poetik der Prophetentexte ebenso wie im Bereich von Zeit, Offenbarung und Buchfassungen. Dabei zeigt sich, dass sowohl Zweig mit seinem Jeremias -Drama als auch Werfel mit seinem Roman Höret die Stimme eine spezifisch jüdisch-biblische Akzentuierung setzen, aus der sich wiederum eine neue Profilierung beider Literaten ergibt: Indem ihre Werke das Gewicht Jahrtausende alter Mahnung heben, gewinnen sie an unheimlicher Aktualität und öffnen den Blick für eine Zukunft in einer bedrängenden Zeit.

A wide-ranging study of empire, religious prophecy, and nationalism in literature, Russia's Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890-1940 provides the first examination of Russia's self-identification with Rome during a period that encompassed the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state. Analyzing Rome-related texts by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Aleksandr Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin, and Mikhail Bulgakov, Judith Kalb argues that the myth of Russia as the "Third Rome" was resurrected to create an enduring Rome-based discourse of Russian national identity. Russia's Rome fills a gap in both Russian studies and scholarship on the classical tradition, providing valuable material for scholars of Russian culture and history, classicists, and readers interested in the classical heritage.

Draws on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.

This book investigates how culture and economics define novel forms of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan fiction. Tracing cosmopolitanism¿s transition from universalism to vernacularism, the book opens up new avenues for reading cosmopolitan fiction by offering a precise and convenient set of terminology. The figure of the cosmoflâneur identifies a contemporary cosmopolitan character¿s urban mobility and wandering consciousness in interaction with the global and the local. Posthuman cosmopolitanism also extends the meaning of cosmopolitan which comes to embrace the nonhuman alongside the human element. Defining narrative glocality, political hyper-awareness, and narrative immediacy, the book thoroughly explores how cosmopolitan narration forges direct responses to the contemporary world in postmillennial cosmopolitan novels. All of these concepts are elaborated in Ian McEwan¿s Saturday (2005), Zadie Smith¿s NW (2012), Salman Rushdie¿s The Golden House (2017), and Kazuo Ishigurös Klara and the Sun (2021), to which world-engagement is central.

This book explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers - Yosa Buson (1716-83), Ema Saiko (1787-1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), and Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) - experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetry in Japanese literature. Through rigorous close readings, this study changes our understanding of the relationship between lyric form and the representation of self, sense, and feeling in Japanese poetic writing from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The book aims to reach a broad audience, including specialists in East Asian Studies, Anglophone literary studies, and Comparative Literature. 

Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie's female poisoners in the context of Christie's own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver well-deserved comeuppance for gendered and classed wrongdoing ordinarily accepted in everyday life. While critics have long recognized male outlaws, like Robin Hood, who use crime to oppose a corrupt system, this book contends that female outlaws - witches and poisoners - offer a similar heritage of empowered femininity. Far from cozy and formulaic, Agatha Christie's outlaw poisoners offer readers the surprising pleasures of comeuppance, and they set the stage for contemporary detective fiction writers, more recent films depicting poisoning as empowering, and even poison gardens, which are tourist destinations that offer visitors the guilty pleasure of poison.

Dieses Buch bietet einen ersten wissenschaftlichen Überblick über einen bislang vernachlässigten Bereich der deutschsprachigen Kriminalliteratur, der unter der Genrebezeichnung ¿Thriller¿ firmiert ¿ und den Buchmarkt derzeit geradezu dominiert. Dabei besteht das Ziel des Bandes zum einen darin, mithilfe der versammelten Fallstudien Licht ins Dunkel der historischen Entwicklung dieses Genres zu bringen: Angefangen bei Norbert Jacques¿ Dr. Mabuse (1921) als Thriller ¿avant la lettre¿ über die Heftromankultur der Nachkriegsjahrzehnte sowie den Spionageroman und Hardboiled-Krimi der 1980er Jahre bis hin zu postmodernen Destruktionen des Genres durch Georg Klein und Heinrich Steinfest sowie den momentan äußerst erfolgreichen Psychothrillern Sebastian Fitzeks und Juli Zehs deckt der Band dabei Teile einer nach wie vor verschütteten Geschichte nichtkanonisierter Literatur auf. Zum anderen wird es stets auch darum gehen, erzählstrukturelle und gattungstheoretische Spezifika der betrachteten Werke zu identifizieren sowie ihre Teilhabe an zeitgenössischen Diskursen, z.B. über das Böse, über Wahnsinn, Macht und (politische) Feindschaft, über den Konstruktcharakter von Wirklichkeit und die Rolle der Kunst, auszuloten.

Shows how the myth of the American frontier persists as an ever-present, oppressive set of ideas about space, mobility, and race in the mid-twentieth-century literature of Los Angeles.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the reception of Tennessee Williams in China, from rejection and/or misgivings to cautious curiosity and to full-throated acceptance, in the context of profound changes in China's socioeconomic and cultural life and mores since the end of the Cultural Revolution. It fills a conspicuous gap in scholarship in the reception of one of the greatest American playwrights and joins book-length studies of Chinese reception of Shakespeare, Ibsen, O'Neill, Brecht, and other important Western playwrights whose works have been eagerly embraced and appropriated and have had catalytic impact on modern Chinese cultural life.

Many saw the dark side of the American dream, but none wrote about it like Jim Tully. Having spent six years of his childhood in a Cincinnati orphanage, Tully returned to his hometown of St. Marys, Ohio before climbing aboard a freight train in 1901. Drifting across the country as a "road kid," he spent his teens, sleeping in hobo jungles, avoiding railroad cops, and haunting public libraries. After six years on the road, he settled in Kent, Ohio where he boxed professionally and began to write. Following a move to Hollywood where he worked for Charlie Chaplin, Tully issued a stream of critically acclaimed books that serve as a dark and astonishing chronicle of the American underclass. Having established himself as a major American author, he turned his attention to Hollywood writing dozens of articles about the movies, often shocking the Hollywood establishment. Along the way, he picked up such close friends as W. C. Fields, Jack Dempsey, H. L. Mencken, and Frank Capra. He also memorably crossed paths with Jack London, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Langston Hughes.

This book uses diaries written by ordinary British people over the past two centuries to examine and explain the nature and extent of everyday mobilities, such as travel to school, to work, to shop or to visit friends, and to explore the meanings attached to these mobilities. After a critical evaluation of diary writing, the ways in which mobility changed over time, interacted with new forms of transport technology, and varied from place to place are examined. Further chapters focus on the roles of family and life course, gender, income and class, and journey purpose in shaping mobilities, including immobility. It is argued that easy and frequent everyday mobilities were experienced by most of the diarists studied, that travellers could exercise their own agency to adapt easily to new forms of transport technology, but that factors such as gender, class, and location also created significant mobility inequalities.

This book examines trauma in late twentieth- and twenty-first century American popular culture. Trauma has become a central paradigm for reading contemporary American culture. Since the early 1980s, an extensive range of genres increasingly feature traumatised protagonists and traumatic events. From traumatised superheroes in Hollywood blockbusters to apocalyptic-themed television series, trauma narratives abound. Although trauma is predominantly associated with high culture, this project shows how popular culture has become the most productive and innovative area of trauma representation in America. Examining film, television, animation, video games and cult texts, this book develops a series of original paradigms through which to understand trauma in popular culture. These include: popular trauma texts' engagement with postmodern perspectives, formal techniques termed 'competitive narration', 'polynarration' and 'sceptical scriptotherapy', and perpetrator trauma in metafictional games. 

'Not I - Kazuo Ishiguro and the Politics of Misrecognition' takes a closer look at how Ishiguro's narrators deal with their metaphorical 'parents', their literary ancestors from Hamlet to Alfred Prufrock. Ishiguro's narrators unwittingly express a metafictional concern about their existence in the shadows of English literary history and struggle with an imagined pressure to compete with iconic literary characters. This book traces their narrative anxiety against a variety of other canonical intertexts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and T. S. Eliot and takes a closer look at the narrators' narrative strategy of repression. Like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, they all would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed through the carefully falsified construction of their stories. These narrators are never fully in control of their own narratives and so they inadvertently betray their own struggle for recognition.