Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series

Richard Yates (1926-1992) is an American fiction writer known for his dark realism. This book offers an analysis of his five suburban novels, emphasizing themes of disillusionment and the pursuit of identity in the American suburbs. Yates's work is characterized by a narrative style devoid of embellishment, focusing on the mundane struggles of his characters. Critics highlight his ability to blend humor with poignant insights into human frailty, illustrating the contrast between the American Dream and the stark realities of life. The book also situates Yates within the broader context of American suburbanization from the 1930s to the 1970s, examining how his characters navigate societal expectations and personal crises related to gender roles, domesticity, and neurotic responses to inner conflicts. It critiques the influential notion of suburbia as merely conformist space, suggesting that Yates's narratives reveal deeper complexities of the suburban experience. Through a pluralistic approach, the book delves into the historical, sociocultural, and psychological dimensions of Yates's suburban novels, re-evaluating his contribution to American literature and the enduring relevance of literary realism in depicting the human condition.

American popular culture has a rich potential for delivering the narratives of the American people, who are often confined by their race, ethnicity, gender, social class, economic situation, or, in very simple terms, by the conditions of their birth. In this context, the volume focuses on the confinement narratives within the products of popular culture, displaying how movies, documentaries, authors, and artists explore the theme of confinement.

American literature has a rich potential for delivering the narratives of the American people, who are often confined by their race, ethnicity, gender, social class, economic situation, or, in very simple terms, by the conditions of their birth. In this context, the volume focuses on the confinement narratives within the products of literature, with a wide array of chapters from different periods of American literary history.

This interdisciplinary study sees press photographs of the BLM Movement in the US as agents for Black liberation. Close reading both the images and theoretical considerations on Blackness, photography, and the often intangible articulations of racism in today’s society, the book focuses on the work the photographs do for the movement, as they politically garner attention and create discursive places, historically unsettle seemingly fixed narratives about the African American past, and virtually establish room for digital activist debate. Based on Azoulay’s "event of photography" and Rancière’s "politics of aesthetics," it builds the theory of an attentive reading of photography and addresses the larger frameworks of photography as event in anti-racist considerations. In their political-aesthetic and performative dimensions, these photographs negotiate the current matter of Black lives in the United States and articulate ontological dimensions of Blackness as political struggle and affirmative position. They become mobile and material discursive places that lift the protested debates into wider fields of consideration and visibility, complicating notions of society, politics, and interaction.

This book presents the first comprehensive study on U.S.-American female illustrators’ creative imaginations of femininity, 1890-1920. It offers insight into the multi-faceted visual-textual relations across mass and little magazines. Four case studies encompass analyses from magazine front and back covers, illustrated advertisements and advice columns, to illustrated suffragist serials, including magazine illustrations never studied before.

The study intervenes in a field hitherto dominated by formal and historical analyses of the literary letter. Across the five case studies, the method of reading epistolarity as a motif is applied to a selection of American novels published after 1990: Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine series (1991-2016), Gordon Lish’s Epigraph (1996), Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea (2001), Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004), and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017). The texts encompass considerable formal and thematic variations: Bantock seeks a return to the literary letter; Lish and Dunn test the limitations of letters for conveying individual experience to a distant other; Robinson and Erdrich envision epistolarity as an address to a future. Exploring the employment of epistolarity as a motif, the study offers an interpretation of the messages these fictions extend for readers in a post-letter world. Communication technologies and practices may change, but epistolarity as a motif - a reprise of a scene of encounter that depends on keeping a distance between addresser and addressee – remains a deeply compelling site of inquiry in twenty-first-century literature.

Spider Web, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk explores the shifting functions of the network as a metaphor, model, and as an epistemological framework in US American literature and culture from the 19^th century until today. The book critically inquires into the literary, cultural, philosophical, and scientific rhetoric, values, and ideological underpinnings that have given rise to the network concept. Literature and culture play a major role in the ways in which networks have been imagined and how they have evolved as conceptual models. This study regards networks as historically emergent and culturally constructed formations closely tied with the development of knowledge technologies in the process of modernization as well as with an increasingly critical awareness of network technologies and infrastructures. While the rise of the network in scientific, philosophical, political and sociological discourses has received wide attention, this book contributes an important cultural and historical perspective to network theory by demonstrating how US American literature and culture have been key sites for thinking in and about networks in the past two centuries.

Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels that this book analyses withdraw from overt memory discourses and create new ways of re-membering that refigure the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is ‘memorable’ in the first place. Combining the analysis of the novels’ overall structure with close readings of selected passages, this book links latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level, activating readers to challenge their learned ways of reading for memory.

Discrimination, stigmatization, xenophobia, heightened securitization – fear and blaming of "aliens within" – characterize the world infected by COVID-19. Such fears have a long cultural history, however, particularly in connecting pathology with race, poverty, and migration. This volume explores theory and narratives of disease, danger, and displacement through the lenses of cultural, literary, and film studies, historical representation, ethnics studies, sociology and cultural geography, classics, music, and linguistics. Investigations range from, for example, illness discourse in the ancient classics to images of perilous intruders in the Age of Trump, from the Haitian Revolution and subsequent zombie stereotypes to current, problematic refugee resettlement in the US South and Greek islands, from the urban underworld in nineteenth-century sensation novels to ethnic women "on the stroll" in coronavirus times. The collection is organized into three thematically intertwined parts: Stigmatizing the Racialized Underclass; Pathologizing the Other; Constructing and Countering Collapse. It examines changing or recurrent aporias in tropes of belonging and exclusion, as well as the birthing of new forms of identity, agency, and countercultural expression.

In the last twenty years, how has U.S.-American writing and the reading public responded to the complexity of an American culture resolutely situated in a larger, highly politicized, globalized world undergoing radical change? The 20th-century modes of realism and postmodernism have been succeeded by writerly practices that are that are invested in the idea of embodied ‘authenticity’ and that are relatable to neorealism, whether it be via outright affirmation or critical experimentation and appropriation. The individual case studies mark the ways in which postmillennial U.S.-American writing is marked by an ongoing awareness toward complexity and the entanglement of writers and the reading public with pressing political concerns, and, at times oppressive, social and economic discursive and structural formations. These contributions further attest to how narrative and structural complexity, grammatical and lexical sophistication, and social nuance endure as the main literary modes of confronting 21st-century political life. This volume is thus of interest for both the study of U.S.-American political culture and U.S.-American literature.

How does Cajun literature, emerging in the 1980s, represent the dynamic processes of remembering in Cajun culture?

Known for its hybrid constitution and deeply ingrained oral traditions, Cajun culture provides an ideal testing ground for investigating the collective memory of a group. In particular, francophone and anglophone Cajun texts by such writers as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, Ron Thibodeaux, Darrell Bourque, and Kirby Jambon reveal not only a shift from an oral to a written tradition. They also show hybrid perspectives on the Cajun collective memory. Based on recurring references to place, the texts also reflect on the (Acadian) past and reveal the innate ability of the Cajuns to adapt through repeated intertextual references. The Cajun collective memory is thus defined by a transnational outlook, a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages to establish and legitimize a collective identity both amid the linguistic and cultural diversity in Louisiana, and in the face of American mainstream culture.

Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory represents the first analysis of the mnemonic strategies Cajun writers use to explore and sustain the Cajun identity and collective memory.

Taking its cue from Jacques Derrida’s concept of le mal d’archive, this study explores the interrelations between the experience of loss, melancholia, archives and their (self-)destructive tendencies, surfacing in different forms of spectrality, in selected poetry of British Romanticism. It argues that the British Romantics were highly influenced by the period’s archival fever – manifesting itself in various historical, material, technological and cultural aspects – and (implicitly) reflected and engaged with these discourses and materialities/medialities in their works. This is scrutinized by focusing on two basal, closely related facets: the subject’s feverish desire to archive and the archive’s (self-)destructive tendencies, which may also surface in an ambivalent, melancholic relishing in the archived object’s presence within its absence. Through this new theoretical perspective, details and coherence previously gone unnoticed shall be laid bare, ultimately contributing to a new and more profound understanding of British Romanticism(s). It will be shown that the various discursive and material manifestations of archives and archival practices not only echo the period’s technological-cultural and historical developments along with its incisive experiencing of loss, but also fundamentally determine Romantic subjectivity and aesthetics.

Even though the literary trope of the flâneur has been proclaimed ‘dead’ on several occasions, it still proves particularly lively in contemporary Anglophone fiction. This study investigates how flânerie takes a belated ‘ethical turn’ in its more recent manifestations by negotiating models of ethical subjectivity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s writings on the ‘aesthetics of existence’ as well as Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness as conditio humana, it establishes a link between post-sovereign models of subject formation and a paradoxical constellation of flânerie, which surfaces most prominently in the work of Walter Benjamin. By means of detailed readings of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, Teju Cole’s Open City, Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, Or a Way to Lose More Slowly, this book traces how the ambivalence of flânerie and its textual representation produces ethical norms while at the same time propagating the value of difference by means of disrupting societal norms of sameness. Precarious Flânerie and the Ethics of the Self in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction thus shows that the flânerie text becomes a medium of ethical critique in post-postmodern times.

This book deals with letters in Anglophone Canadian short stories of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century in the context of liminality. It argues that in the course of the epistolary renaissance, the letter – which has often been deemed to be obsolete in literature – has not only enjoyed an upsurge in novels but also migrated to the short story, thus constituting the genre of the epistolary short story.

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As striking, counter-intuitive and distasteful as the combination of children and anxiety may seem, some of the most popular children's classics abound in depictions of traumatic relationships, bloody wars and helpless heroes. This book draws on Freudian and Lacanian anxiety models to investigate the psychological and political significance of this curious juxtaposition, as it stands out in Golden Age novels from both sides of the Atlantic and their present-day adaptations. The stories discussed in detail, so the argument goes, identify specific anxieties and forms of anxiety management as integral elements of hegemonial middle-class identity. Apart from its audacious link between psychoanalysis and Marxist, feminist, as well as postcolonial ideology criticism, this study provides a nuanced analysis of the ways in which allegedly trivial texts negotiate questions of individual and (trans)national identities. In doing so, it offers a fresh look at beloved tales like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, contributes to the dynamic field of adaptation studies and highlights the necessity to approach children's entertainment more seriously and more sensitively than it is generally the case.

This study proposes that – rather than trying to discern the normative value of Afropolitanism as an identificatory concept, politics, ethics or aesthetics – Afropolitanism may be best approached as a distinct historical and cultural moment, that is, a certain historical constellation that allows us to glimpse the shifting and multiple silhouettes which Africa, as signifier, as real and imagined locus, embodies in the globalized, yet predominantly Western, cultural landscape of the 21st century. As such, Making Black History looks at contemporary fictions of the African or Black Diaspora that have been written and received in the moment of Afropolitanism.

Discursively, this moment is very much part of a diasporic conversation that takes place in the US and is thus informed by various negotiations of blackness, race, class, and cultural identity. Yet rather than interpreting Afropolitan literatures (merely) as a rejection of racial solidarity, as some commentators have, they should be read as ambivalent responses to post-racial discourses dominating the first decade of the 21st century, particularly in the US, which oscillate between moments of intense hope and acute disappointment.

Please read our interview with Dominique Haensell here:
https://blog.degruyter.com/de-gruyters-10th-open-access-book-anniversary-dominique-haensell-and-her-winning-title-making-black-history/

Challenging the ‘success story’ of curiosity from original sin to intellectual virtue, this study uses an innovative methodological approach to the history of ideas as a non-teleological neural network based on current research in information technology and neurophysiology. The network offers a dynamic alternative to the ‘development’ of curiosity within the progress-oriented mythology of the Enlightenment, emphasizing the oscillation and interaction of ideas within the processes of their construction, as well as exposing the power relations behind them.

The text corpus focuses on enactments of curiosity in English literature of the 'Long' Eighteenth Century (c. 1680-1818), such as transgression of boundaries, breach of taboo, gendered curiosity, sensationalism, or academic endeavour, bringing together a variety of examples from all major genres.

The Age of Curiosity contributes to current debates on a post-Foucauldian renewal of Lovejoy’s history of ideas in Enlightenment studies, exploring both curiosity as an indispensable trait for the search of answers to the fundamental yet unresolved questions of ‘identity’ or ‘truth’, and its potential as cura, the care for others and the world.

This study traces the connection of infinity and Levinasian ethics in 21st-century fiction. It tackles the paradox of how infinity can be (re-)presented in the finite space between the covers of a book and finds an answer that combines conceptual metaphor theory with concepts from classical narratology and beyond, such as mise en abyme, textual circularity, intertextuality or omniscient narration. It argues that texts with such structures may be conceptualised as infinite via Lakoff and Núñez’s Basic Metaphor of Infinity. The catachrestic transfer of infinity from structure to text means that the texts themselves are understood to be infinite. Taking its cue from the central role of the infinite in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, the function of such ‘fictions of infinity’ turns out to be ethical: infinite textuality disrupts reading patterns and calls into question the reader’s spontaneity to interpret. This hypothesis is put to the test in detailed readings of four 21st-century novels, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and John Banville’s The Infinities. This book thus combines ethical criticism with structural aesthetics to uncover ethical potential in fiction.

Distinctive Styles and Authorship in Alternative Comics addresses the benefits and limits of analyses of style in alternative comics. It offers three close readings of works serially published between 1980 and 2018 – Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, and Jason Lutes’ Berlin – and discusses how artistic style may influence the ways in which readers construct authorship.

This study investigates the figure of haunting in the New Nature Writing. It begins with a historical survey of nature writing and traces how it came to represent an ideal of ‘natural’ space as empty of human history and social conflict. Building on a theoretical framework which combines insights from ecocriticism and spatial theory, the author explores the spatial dimensions of haunting and ‘hauntology’ and shows how 21^st-century writers draw on a Gothic repertoire of seemingly supernatural occurrences and spectral imagery to portray ‘natural’ space as disturbed, uncanny and socially contested. Iain Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane are revealed to apply psychogeography’s interest in ‘hidden histories’ and haunted places to spaces associated with ‘wilderness’ and ‘the countryside’. Kathleen Jamie’s allusions to the Gothic are put in relation to her feminist re-writing of ‘the outdoors’, and John Burnside’s use of haunting is shown to dismantle fictions of ‘the far north’. This book provides not only a discussion of a wide range of factual and fictional narratives of the present but also an analysis of the intertextual dialogue with the Romantic tradition which enfolds in these texts.

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.

In this volume, scholars from different disciplines – Old English and Anglo-Latin literature and linguistics, palaeography, history, runology, numismatics and archaeology – explore what are here called ‘micro-texts’, i.e. very short pieces of writing constituting independent, self-contained texts. For the first time, these micro-texts are here studied in their forms and communicative functions, their pragmatics and performativity.

Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and control of the future. They show the struggle with uncertainties and the construction of individual or collective ‘logics’ of risk, which oscillate between rational calculation and emotion, helplessness and denial, and an enabling or destructive sense of adventure and danger. Advancing the study of risk in fiction beyond the confinement to dystopian disaster narratives, this book shows how topical notions, such as chance and probability, uncertainty and responsibility, fears of decline and transgression, all cluster around risk.

Ever since the 1990s, school shootings have shocked the public in their brutality, their suddenness, and their inexplicability. While film and literature have played a role in the heated debates about so-called copycat crimes, the growing body of fictionalizations of school shootings has been neglected thus far. However, in a discourse in which the boundaries between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred, this book shows how fiction shapes and structures, challenges and disrupts cultural processes of meaning-making. Hence, for a better understanding of the school shooting phenomenon, the relevance of fiction on all levels of discourse construction requires thorough analysis. This book therefore develops a new approach to the role of fiction for contemporary forms of excessive violence. By combining narrative theory with insights from sociology and other disciplines, it provides the means for apprehending and describing the relevance of fiction for contemporary discourses. Furthermore, it provides exemplary analyses of more specific functions of literary and filmic fictionalizations of school shootings between 2000 and 2016.

Twentieth-Century Metapoetry and the Lyric Tradition reveals the unique value of metapoems for exploring twentieth-century poetry. By placing these texts into a hitherto barely investigated literary-historical perspective, it demonstrates that modern metapoetry is steeped in the lyric tradition to a much greater extent than previously acknowledged. Since these literary continuities that cut across epochal boundaries can be traced across all major poetic movements, they challenge established accounts of the history of twentieth-century poetry that postulate a radical break with the (immediate) past. Moreover, the finding that metapoems perpetuate traditional forms and topoi distinguishes metapoetry historically and systematically from metafiction and metadrama. After highlighting the most important differences as regards to the function of metareference in poetry on the one side, and in fiction and drama on the other, the book concludes with a discussion of how to account for these generic differences theoretically. With its "extraordinarily subtle and perceptive" (Ronald Bush, St. John's College, Oxford) interpretive readings of over one hundred metapoems by canonical anglophone authors, it offers the first representative selection of twentieth-century poems about poetry in English.

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Since the late twentieth century, letters in literature have seen a remarkable renaissance. The prominence of letters in recent fiction is due in part to the rediscovery, by contemporary writers, of letters as an effective tool for rendering aspects of historicity, liminality, marginalization and the expression of subjectivity vis-à-vis an ‘other’; it is also due, however, to the artistically challenging inclusion of the new electronic media of communication into fiction.
While studies of epistolary fiction have so far concentrated on the eighteenth century and on thematic concerns, this volume charts the epistolary renaissance in recent literature, entering new territory by also focusing on the aesthetic implications of the epistolary mode. In particular, the essays in this volume illuminate the potential of the epistolary (including digital forms) for rendering contemporary sensitivities. The volume thus offers a comprehensive assessment of letter narratives in contemporary literature. Through its focus on the aesthetic and structural aspects of new epistolary fiction, the inclusion of various narrative forms, and the consideration of both conventional letters and their new digital kindred, The Epistolary Renaissance offers novel insight into a multi-facetted (re)new(ed) genre.

This collection of essays gathers innovative and compelling research on intermedial forms of life writing by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars. Among their subjects of scrutiny are biographies, memoirs, graphic novels, performances, paratheatricals, musicals, silent films, movies, documentary films, and social media. The volume covers a time frame ranging from the nineteenth century to the immediate present. In addition to a shared focus on theories of intermediality and life writing, the authors apply to their subjects both firmly established and cutting-edge theoretical approaches from Cultural Narratology, Cultural History, Biographical Studies, Social Media Studies, Performance Studies, and Visual Culture Studies. The collection also features interviews with practitioners in biography who have produced monographs, films, and novels.

Owing to its relatedness to parchment as the primary writing matter of the Middle Ages, human skin was not only a topic to write about in medieval texts, it was also conceived of as an inscribable surface, both in the material and in the figurative sense. This volume explores the textuality of human skin as discussed by Geoffrey Chaucer and other writers (medical, religious, philosophical, and literary) of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. It presents four main aspects of the complex relations between text, parchment, and human skin as they have been discussed in recent scholarship. These four aspects are, first, the (mostly figurative) resonances between parchment-making and transformations of human skin, second, parchment as a space of contact between animal and human spheres, third, human skin and parchment as sites where (gender) identities are negotiated, and fourth, the place of medieval skin studies within cultural studies and its relationship to the major concerns of cultural studies: the difficult demarcation of skin from body, the instability of any inscription, and the skin’s precarious state as an entity of its own.

This book focuses on the tensions between processes of consciousness and their products like worldviews, theories, models of thought etc. Staying close to their technical meanings in chaos and catastrophe theory, chaotic processes are described in mainly neurobiological and evolutionary terms while products are delineated in their evolutionary logic. Given both a relative opacity of processes of the mind and of the outside world, the dramatic quality of the processes, a certain closeness to ‘hysterical’ and ‘schizophrenic’ tendencies and, within the context of the weakening orientating power of worldviews, an alarming catastrophic potential emerge.
As a consequence, the book aims at a comparative cost-benefit analysis of the transitionality between ‘chaotic’ processes of consciousness and the often ‘catastrophic’ implications of their products within historical frameworks. The central thesis consists in the increasing failure in the orientation of action which cannot be contained by systems of ethics. Materials for this analysis are mainly drawn from texts normally called literary in which the tension between biographical and historical dimensions provides profiles of chaos and catastrophe.

The female performer with a public voice constitutes a remarkably vibrant theme in British and American narratives of the long nineteenth century. The tension between fictional female performers and other textual voices can be seen to refigure the cultural debate over the ‘voice’ of women in aesthetically complex ways. By focusing on singers, actresses, preachers and speakers, this book traces and explores an important tradition of feminine articulation.
Drawing on critical approaches in literary studies, gender studies and philosophy, the book conceptualizes voice for the discussion of narrative texts. Examining voice both as a thematic concern and as an aesthetic effect, the individual chapters analyse how the actual articulation by female performers correlates with their cultural visibility and agency. What this study foregrounds is how women characters succeed in making themselves heard even if their voices are silenced in the end.

This book examines dystopian fiction’s recent paradigm shift towards urban dystopias. It links the dystopian tradition with the literary history of the novel, spatio-philosophical concepts against the backdrop of the spatial turn, and systems-theory. Five dystopian novels are discussed in great detail: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and The City & The City (2009), City of Bohane (2011) by Kevin Barry, John Berger’s Lilac and Flag (1992), and Divided Kingdom (2005) by Rupert Thomson. The book includes chapters on the literary history of the dystopian tradition, the referential interplay of maps and literature, urban spaces in literature, borders and transgressions, and on systems-theory as a tool for charting dystopian fiction. The result is a detailed overview of how dystopian fiction constantly adapts to – and reflects on – the actual world.

The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe is the first study to address the rhetorical dimensions of Poe’s textual and discursive practices. It argues that Poe is a figure and figurer of the emergence of the modern understanding of literature in the early nineteenth century that resulted from the birth of the romantic author and the so-called ‘death of rhetoric’. Building on accounts of Poe as a skilled navigator of American antebellum print culture, Gero Guttzeit reinterprets Poe as representative of the vital role that transatlantic rhetoric played in antebellum literature. He investigates rhetorical figures of the author in Poe’s critical writings, tales, poems, and lectures to give a new account of Poe’s significance for antebellum literary culture. In so doing, he also proposes a general rhetorical theory of theoretical, poetical, and performative figures of the author. Beyond Poe studies, the book intervenes in current debates on the romantic origins of the modern author and demonstrates that rhetorical theory offers new ways of exploring authorship beyond the nineteenth century.

Pool was an avant-garde group that originated in 1927 in Britain and was active under this name until 1933. The group consisted of the well-known modernist poet H.D., the English writer Bryher, and the young Scottish writer and artist Kenneth Macpherson. All three were first and foremost writers, who at one point discovered film as another modern, experimental medium of artistic expression. Pool associated with almost all the iconic modernists of their time, with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemmingway, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, to name only a few. In addition, due to their interest in film, they were also befriended with such influential filmmakers as Sergei Eisenstein and Georg Wilhelm Pabst, and became closely associated with Weimar Berlin film culture.
Pool unites classical Modernism and modernity, two directions that are usually considered to be contradictory. The Pool phenomenon opens a new perspective onto Modernism and prompts a reconsideration of its canonical texts and figures. Contrary to many artists of Modernism, who devised highly individualistic aesthetic styles, the artists of Pool strove towards a universal art of humanity that was rooted in all-human nature and psychology.

This book is the first sustained investigation of the political dimension in the work of J.G. Ballard. A product of and reaction to the cultural-socio-economic moment commonly designated as the postmodern condition, Ballard’s oeuvre is read as a continuous and developing meditation on the postmodern, examining it specifically as an expression of late capitalism. The book shows that at the heart of this meditation lies the question of resistance. Drawing on a wide range of concepts and ideas taken from the field of critical theory, it argues that in the face of a world marked by an unprecedented expansion of capital, in which modernity’s grand narratives have been invalidated and in which received forms of political struggle have lost their effectiveness, Ballard’s fiction commits itself to a deliberately irrational and extreme, pataphysical thought in order to develop a new discourse of resistance. Against past readings that have construed Ballard’s writing as non-political, decadent, or quietist, the study thus reveals Ballard as a thoroughly political author, committed to a subversive politics. In this way, the book also constitutes a timely intervention in the ongoing discussion concerning the nature and state of the political.

This study seeks to fill a major gap in the fields of Nineteenth-Century American and British Studies by examining how nineteenth-century intellectuals shaped and re-shaped aesthetic traditions across the Atlantic Ocean. Special attention is paid to a group of salient cultural concepts, such as artist-as-hero, imagination, the picturesque, reform, simultaneity, and seriality. Although embedded in a particular aesthetic tradition, these concepts travel from one culture to another and are transformed along their transatlantic journeys. The purpose of this book is to explore the roles of these ‘traveling concepts’ within the realm of transatlantic cultures and to trace their at times surprising paths within ever-widening transnational intellectual networks.

This collection comprises essays from various interdisciplinary perspectives – e.g. literary scholarship, intermediality, art history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and medicine – to analyze and interpret the fictional and non-fictional works by Siri Hustvedt, an author whose reputation and public presence have been growing steadily in the 21st century and who is recognized as one of the most widely read and appreciated contemporary American writers. In her significance and stature as a public intellectual, she is not merely an American writer but a transnational, cosmopolitan author, who develops new forms not only of literary narrative but of interdisciplinary thought and writing, bringing together otherwise separated genres and branches of knowledge in a broad spectrum between literature and philosophy, historiography and art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, narrative and medicine. The present volume is structured into the parts “Literary Creation and Communication,” Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” “Medicine and Narrative,” “Vision, Perception, and Power,” and “Trauma, Memory, and the Ambiguities of Self” and closes with an interview of Siri Hustvedt by Susanne Becker in which Hustvedt elucidates her personal conception of her own creative processes of writing.

Aldred’s interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D.IV) is one of the most substantial representatives of the Old English variety known as late Old Northumbrian. Although it has received a great deal of attention in the past two centuries, there are still numerous issues which remain unresolved. The papers in this collection approach the gloss from a variety of perspectives – language, cultural milieu, palaeography, glossography – in order to shed light on many of these issues, such as the authorship of the gloss, the morphosyntax and vocabulary of the dialect(s) it represents, its sources and relationship to the Rushworth Gospels, and Aldred’s cultural and religious affiliations. Because of its breadth of coverage, the collection will be of interest and great value to scholars in the fields of Anglo-Saxon studies and English historical linguistics.

Light and darkness shape our perception of the world. This is true in a literal sense, but also metaphorically: in theology, philosophy, literature and the arts the light of day signifies life, safety, knowledge and all that is good, while the darkness of the night suggests death, danger, ignorance and evil.

A closer inspection, however, reveals that things are not quite so clear cut and that light and darkness cannot be understood as simple binary opposites. On a biological level, for example, daylight and darkness are inseparable factors in the calibration of our circadian rhythms, and a lack of periodical darkness appears to be as contrary to health as a lack of exposure to sunlight. On a cultural level, too, night and darkness are far from being universally condemnable: in fiction, drama and poetry the darkness of the night allows not only nightmares but also dreams, it allows criminals to ply their trade and allows lovers to meet, it allows the pursuit of pleasure as well as deep thought, it allows metamorphoses, transformations and transgressions unthinkable in the light of day. But night is not merely darkness. The night gains significance as an alternative space, as an ‘other of the day’, only when it is at least partially illuminated.

The volume examines the interconnection of night, darkness and nocturnal illumination across a broad range of literary texts. The individual essays examine historically specific light conditions in literature, tracing the symbolic and metaphoric content of darkness and illumination and the attitudes towards them.

This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.

The book explores the discursive and theoretical conditions for conceptualizing the postethnic literary. It historicizes US multicultural and postcolonial studies as institutionalized discursive formations, which constitute a paratext that regulates the reception of literary texts according to the paradigm of representativeness. Rather than following that paradigm, the study offers an alternative framework by rereading contemporary literary texts for their investment in literary form. By means of self-reflective intermedial transpositions, the writings of Sherman Alexie, Chang-rae Lee, and Jamaica Kincaid insist upon a differentiation between the representation of cultural sign systems or subject positions and the dramatization of individual gestures of authorship. As such, they form a postethnic literary constellation, further probed in the epilogue of the study focused on Dave Eggers.

This study tries, through a systematic and historical analysis of the concept of critical authority, to write a history of literary criticism from the end of the 17th to the end of the 18th century that not only takes the discursive construction of its (self)representation into account, but also the social and economic conditions of its practice. It tries to consider the whole of the critical discourse on literature and criticism in the time period covered. Thus, it is distinctive through its methodology (there is no systematic account of the historical development of critical authority and no discussion of the institutionalization of criticism of such a scope), its material of analysis (most of the many hundred texts self-reflexively commenting on criticism that are discussed here have been so far virtually ignored) and through its results, a complex history of criticism in the 18th century that is neither reductive nor the accumulation of isolated aspects or author figures, but that probes into the very nature of the activity of criticism. The aim of this study is both to provide a thorough historical understanding of the emergence of criticism and as a consequence an understanding of the inner workings and power relations that structure criticism to this day.

While the popular talk of English common sense in the eighteenth century might seem a by-product of familiar Enlightenment discourses of rationalism and empiricism, this book argues that terms such as ‘common sense’ or ‘good sense’ are not simply synonyms of applied reason. On the contrary, the discourse of common sense is shaped by a defensive impulse against the totalizing intellectual regimes of the Enlightenment and the cultural climate of change they promote, in order to contain the unbounded discursive proliferation of modern learning. Hence, common sense discourse has a vital regulatory function in cultural negotiations of political and intellectual change in eighteenth-century Britain against the backdrop of patriotic national self-concepts. This study discusses early eighteenth-century common sense in four broad complexes, as to its discursive functions that are ethical (which at that time implies aesthetic as well), transgressive (as a corrective), political (in patriotic constructs of the nation), and repressive (of otherness). The selection of texts in this study strikes a balance between dominant literary culture – Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson – and the periphery, such as pamphlets and magazine essays, satiric poems and patriotic songs.

The category of vision is significant for Modernist texts as well as for the unfolding discourse of Modernism itself. Within the general Modernist fascination with the artistic and experimental possibilities of vision and perception this study looks at Virginia Woolf’s novels and her critical writings and examines the relation between visuality and aesthetics.

An aesthetics of vision, as this study argues, becomes a productive principle of narrative. The visual is not only pertinent to Woolf’s processes of composition, but her works create a kind of vision that is proper to the text itself – a vision that reflects on the experience of seeing and renegotiates the relation between the reader and the text.

The study investigates key dimensions of aesthetic vision. It addresses vision in the context of theories of aesthetic experience and identifies a semantics of seeing. It analyses functions of symbolic materiality in the presentation of boundaries of perception, modes of temporality and poetic potentialities. In exploring the connections between vision and language, it seeks to provide new perspectives for a reassessment of what occurs in Modernism's relation to vision.

This study takes a fresh look at the abundant scenarios of disguise in early modern prose fiction and suggests reading them in the light of the contemporary religio-political developments. More specifically, it argues that Elizabethan narratives adopt aspects of the heated Eucharist debate during the Reformation, including officially renounced notions like transubstantiation, to negotiate culturally pressing concerns regarding identity change.

Drawing on the rich field of research on the adaptation of pre-Reformation concerns in Anglican England, the book traces a cross-fertilisation between the Reformation and the literary mode of romance. The study brings together topics which are currently being strongly debated in early modern studies: the turn to religion, a renewed interest in aesthetics, and a growing engagement with prose fiction.

Narratives which are discussed in detail are William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon, Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadia, and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd and A Margarite of America, George Gascoigne’s Steele Glas, John Lyly’s Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, Barnabe Riche’s Farewell, Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.

Die Studie untersucht das latente Wirken des Theaters in der britischen romantischen Literatur. Sie zeigt, wie fasziniert Wordsworth und Scott von Theaterkonzepten waren, die auf den britischen Bühnen nicht umzusetzen waren, und wie sie diese in ihren eigenen Texten gestalteten.

Die Untersuchung diskutiert zunächst die allgemeine Bedeutung des Theaters als Medium und Diskursfeld zur Behandlung ästhetischer, politischer und epistemischer Fragen um 1800. Sie zeigt anschließend, dass dieses moderne Theater in frühen Dramen Wordsworths und Scotts zwar nicht umgesetzt werden konnte, ihre späteren Werke jedoch unverändert beeinflusste. Detailanalysen der Lyrik Wordsworths und der Scott’schen Romane legen offen, wie beide ein spezifisches Text-Theater entwickelten, das die spätere Theaterkultur in Großbritannien beeinflussen sollte.

Das Buch ist eine der ersten Detailuntersuchungen zu diesem Thema und entwickelt zudem ein neues integratives Modell der Intermedialität. Es richtet sich an alle an der britischen Romantik Interessierten sowie an all diejenigen, die mehr über das faszinierende Verhältnis von Literatur und Theater erfahren möchten.

The study develops a new theoretical approach to the relationship between two media (jazz music and writing) and demonstrates its explanatory power with the help of a rich sampling of jazz poems. Currently, the mimetic approach to intermediality (e.g., the notion that jazz poetry imitates jazz music) still dominates the field of criticism. This book challenges that interpretive approach. It demonstrates that a mimetic view of jazz poetry hinders readers from perceiving the metaphoric ways poets rendered music in writing. Drawing on and extending recent cognitive metaphor theories (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier), it promotes a conceptual metaphor model that allows readers to discover the innovative ways poets translate “melody,” “dynamics,” “tempo,” “mood,” and other musical elements into literal and figurative expressions that invite readers to imagine the music in their mind’s eye (i.e., their mind’s ear).

Im Rückgriff sowohl auf T.S. Eliots These von der „dissociation of sensibility“ als auch auf die Kontroverse zwischen Elias und Duerr zeigt sich in der Analyse von lyrischen Texten des 17. Jahrhunderts, dass ein folgenschwerer Paradigmenwechsel das Ende des Barock und den Beginn der Moderne einleitet.
In ihrer erotisierten Theologie zeigen Donne und Crashaw, dass der Körper nicht von der Ebene der Metaphysik zu trennen ist, dass vielmehr Körperflüssigkeiten zu prokreativen Himmelsleitern werden und für den Dichter in der Rolle des Ganymed eine göttliche Insemination an die Stelle der herkömmlichen Inspiration getreten ist.
Im Unterschied hierzu setzt in der Versdichtung der Cavaliers zwischen 1620 und 1630 eine früh-klassizistische Gegenbewegung ein: beeinflusst durch die Erfindung der Bühnenfigur des Don Juan negieren Dichter wie Carew, Suckling und der zur Restaurationszeit gehörende Earl of Rochester die im Barock mit Nachdruck betonte Allianz von Erotik und Theologie, um fortan die Quantität des sexuellen Abenteuers zu zelebrieren. Ostentativ die Extreme von Lust und Ekel hervorhebend, antizipieren die Cavaliers Körper- und Erotikentwürfe, die im 19. Jahrhundert so heterogene Figuren der literarischen Moderne wie den Dandy oder den ‚ubusesken‘ Triebmenschen hervorbringen sollten.

Die Studie untersucht, wie die lineare Kette sprachlicher Zeichen in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte vor dem ,inneren Auge‘ des Rezipienten einen Vorstellungsraum konstituiert. Sie verbindet damit in neuartiger Weise Kategorien der Textlinguistik mit Ansätzen der Semantik und der Kognitiven Grammatik. Zudem werden Ergebnisse relevanter Nachbardisziplinen wie der Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft sowie der Wahrnehmungs- und Gestaltpsychologie einbezogen. Auf der Basis eines Korpus von Textsorten mit hohen deskriptiven Anteilen, wie etwa Reiseführern oder geographischen Sachtexten, wird eine Taxonomie von prototypischen ,Blickführungstypen‘ erarbeitet und anhand von zahlreichen exemplarischen Analysen sowie graphischen Darstellungen veranschaulicht. Diese Blickführungstypen werden als spezifische Linearisierungsstrategien definiert, die auf bildschematischen Konfigurationen aus Trajektor und Landmarke beruhen. In diesem Kontext wird analysiert, inwiefern Lokalisierungsausdrücke sowohl durch grammatische und lexikalische Kohäsion wie auch durch ortsdeiktische Situierungen zur Raumkonstitution beitragen. Von besonderem Interesse sind hierbei die textuellen Effekte und Funktionen, die aus der Blickführung resultieren.

Der kultur- und mediengeschichtliche Stellenwert des 17. Jahrhunderts wird unterschätzt. In diesem Buch unternimmt Ingo Berensmeyer die Neuvermessung einer vernachlässigten Epoche, indem er nach den Wirkungsbedingungen literarischer Kultur in England zwischen ca. 1630 und 1700 fragt. In dieser Zeit des Bürgerkriegs, der Restauration und Revolution ist das Literarische oftmals eine Fortsetzung des Krieges mit anderen Mitteln. Doch die streitenden Bürger der 'republic of letters' eint ein Kontingenzproblem: Mit dem wachsenden Einfluß des Buchdrucks nimmt nicht nur die Leserschaft zu, sondern auch die Menge alternativer, konkurrierender Beobachtungen. In einer Reihe von Beispielanalysen zeigt Berensmeyer, wie unterschiedliche Kontingenzerfahrungen im 17. Jahrhundert literarisch verarbeitet werden und wie der Kontingenzbegriff dabei zur Motivationskraft einer fundamentalen Neuorientierung literarischer Wirkungen avanciert. Die Untersuchung mündet in eine Neubewertung der Rolle des englischen Neoklassizismus als einer kulturellen Konfiguration, die sich auf ein breites Spektrum gesellschaftlicher Praktiken und Institutionen auswirkt: von der Dichtung zur Politik und von der Erkenntnistheorie zur gepflegten Verhaltenskultur. Die in traditionellen Literaturgeschichten oft stiefkindlich behandelte 'Zwischenzeit' zwischen Shakespeare und der Entwicklung des Romans erscheint so in einem neuen Licht.

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit den neuesten Entwicklungen im Verhältnis von Literatur und Naturwissenschaft. Im ersten Teil findet eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den science wars statt. Eine besondere Rolle spielt dabei die "Rhetorik der Naturwissenschaften", da hier auch die Literaturwissenschaft zum Tragen kommen kann. Dabei werden rhetorische Elemente in der naturwissenschaftlichen Sprache nicht als Beleg für Mängel in der Erkenntnisfähigkeit kritisiert, sondern gerade auch Konzepte nutzbar gemacht, die die Erkenntnisträchtigkeit von Metaphern untersuchen. Darüber hinaus werden Aspekte aus der Gedächtnisforschung, der Rhetorik, der Kognitionsbiologie und der Evolutionstheorie dafür herangezogen, Fragen nach der Sprachentstehung und der Herkunft der anscheinend ubiquitären rhetorischen und poetischen Elemente der Sprache zu beleuchten. Die Arbeit soll damit einen Beitrag auf dem Weg zu einer produktiven Interdisziplinarität leisten.

Im zweiten Teil werden derzeit gängige literaturwissenschaftlichen Positionen zur literarischen Verarbeitung neuerer naturwissenschaftlicher Themen behandelt. Im Vordergrund steht eine Kritik an der kategorischen Ablehnung von Einflußmodellen, da diese nicht nur konzeptionelle Fehler aufweist, sondern auch dem Befund zuwiderläuft. Es folgen Untersuchungen von literarischen Texten, an denen sich nicht nur ein souveräner und kritischer Umgang mit naturwissenschaftlichen Themen zeigen läßt, sondern auch eine imaginative Bearbeitung, die jeden Verdacht auf ein hierarchisches Gefälle oder eine Abhängigkeit von wissenschaftlichen Wahrheitsansprüchen unterläuft.

Diese Arbeit beschreibt die Entwicklung englischer Partizipial- und Gerundialkonstruktionen in mittelenglischer und frühneuenglischer Zeit und untersucht dabei die Funktion von Textsorten im Prozeß des Sprachwandels. Aufbauend auf einer detaillierten Analyse sämtlicher Partizipial- und Gerundialkonstruktionen in sechs Textsorten einer überarbeiteten und erweiterten Fassung des Helsinki-Korpus wird gezeigt, daß sich die Hauptkonstruktionstypen in einer geordneten Reihenfolge über Textsorten ausbreiten. Die Funktion von Textsorten im Sprachwandel kann dabei als Katalysatorenfunktion bestimmt werden. Textsorten sind für die Ausbreitung, nicht aber für die Entstehung einer Konstruktion verantwortlich. Die Katalysatorenfunktion basiert einerseits auf dem spezifischen funktionalen Profil der Textsorten, andererseits auf ihrer Position innerhalb der Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der englischen Sprache.

Textsortenabhängiger Sprachwandel, wie er sich in der Ausbreitung von Partizipial- und Gerundialkonstruktionen zeigt, wird als Beispiel für die Elaborierungsphase im Prozeß der Standardisierung und der Ausbreitung von Schriftlichkeit gewertet.

Die Studie bearbeitet anhand der Themenverknüpfung "Sexualität und Tod" ein im engeren Sinne literaturwissenschaftliches, im weiteren Sinne kulturwissenschaftliches Problemfeld: das der Interdependenz literarischer und soziokultureller Phänomene im historischen Wandel. Den Untersuchungsbereich bildet die englische Kultur vom späten 18. bis zum ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert, bzw. die englische Schauer- und Sensationsliteratur dieser Zeit. Die Arbeit stellt aber auch allgemein die bisher umfassendste Behandlung der Themenverknüpfung "Sexualität und Tod" in Literatur und soziokulturellem Kontext dar. Methodisch geht die Untersuchung weit über traditionelle Motivgeschichte hinaus und verbindet Ansätze des Strukturalismus (Jakobson, Lodge), der Soziologie (Parsons, Meyer/Ort), der Psychologie (Freud) und der Kulturtheorie (Bataille, Foucault). Inhaltlich untersucht sie zum einen die historischen Manifestationen und Wandlungen der Diskurse "Sexualität" und "Tod", und andererseits - in einem ausführlichen textanalytischen Teil - literarische Werke von Horace Walpole, M.G. Lewis, Mary Shelley, John W. Polidori, Emily Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde und Bram Stoker. Im Zuge der Analyse und Korrelation allgemein kultureller, gesellschaftlicher und literarischer Diskurse entwickelt die Arbeit u.a. ein Typenschema möglicher Themenverknüpfungen, ein bipolares Modell soziokultureller Tabufunktionen und die literarhistorische Hypothese vom "Pendel der Verknüpfungsmodi".

Dieses Buch behandelt Ekphrasen, d.h. literarische Bildbeschreibungen in den Werken englischer Renaissance-Autoren vor dem Hintergrund elisabethanischer Theoriebildungen zur Abbildungsproblematik. Verweise auf meist fiktive Kunstwerke in den Werken Sidneys, Spensers, Lylys und Shakespeares dienen als Ausgangspunkt, um das herrschende repräsentationstheoretische Klima im England des späten sechzehnten Jahrhunderts zu rekonstruieren. Es wird hierbei von der Annahme ausgegangen, daß literarische Bildbeschreibungen aufgrund ihrer doppelten Abbildungsstruktur - sie repräsentieren verbal, was bereits visuell abgebildet ist - Fragestellungen und Problemkreise des Repräsentationsverständnisses ihrer jeweiligen Entstehungszeit widerspiegeln. Es werden dazu exemplarische Beispiele aus Prosa, Drama, Epos und Lyrik der letzten beiden Dekaden des 16. Jahrhunderts herangezogen, um darauf hinzuweisen, daß literarische Ekphrasen in unterschiedlichen Gattungen bzw. Medien für literarische Selbstreflexion dienten. Die Entstehungszeit der hier behandelten Werke liegt meist nur wenige Jahre auseinander und dokumentiert somit punktuell einen sehr kurzen Moment englischer Literatur- bzw. Abbildungsgeschichte. Im vorliegenden Buch soll am konkreten Beispiel vorgeführt werden, daß sich literarische Bildbeschreibungen zur kulturgeschichtlichen Analyse eines spezifischen Epochenbewußtseins eignen. Das ausgehende 16. Jahrhundert mit seinen großen literarischen Umwälzungen und theoretischen Auseinandersetzungen zur Abbildungsfrage stellt ein besonders geeignetes Forschungsgebiet für diesen Ansatz dar.

Die Arbeit versteht sich zum einen als ein Beitrag zu gender studies, das heißt, sie untersucht, auf welche Weise in Erziehungshandbüchern und Romanen des 18. Jahrhunderts Geschlechterrollen konstruiert werden. Sie hebt vor allem die Beteiligung von Autorinnen an der aufklärerisch-bürgerlichen Diskussion um die Sozialisation der Frau und um die Rolle der Frau in der Gesellschaft heraus, einer Diskussion, innerhalb derer, vor allem im letzten Jahrzehnt des 18. Jahrhunderts, eine konservative und eine progressive moraldidaktische Position unterschieden werden können. Dabei zeigt sich, und dies ist das zweite Erkenntnisinteresse der Arbeit, daß sich fiktionale Texte, im Unterschied zu nicht-fiktionalen, einer eindeutigen Zuordnung zu der einen oder anderen Position widersetzen; Quellen moraldidaktischer Ambiguität sind Erzählperspektive und Erzählstruktur.

Die fiktionalen Texte, in denen die beschriebene Diskussion geführt wird, werden in der Arbeit als "weibliche Erziehungsromane" definiert. Damit ist zugleich das dritte Erkenntnisinteresse der Arbeit bezeichnet: Die Arbeit will bekannte Autorinnen wie Jane Austen oder Fanny Burney in einem literarischen Umfeld verorten, aus dem sie in der Vergangenheit oft isoliert worden sind; sie untersucht daher die intertextuellen Beziehungen zwischen den Romanen Burneys und Austens und denen unbekannterer Autorinnen wie Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Hays und Jane West. Sie will so auch eine Phase in der Entwicklung des englischen Romans rehabilitieren, die ohne weiteres als eine Phase der "Feminisierung" bezeichnet werden kann.

In englischen Romanen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts dienen Schilderungen von Landschaft und Wetter der Verdeutlichung des Geschehens bzw. der Charakterisierung der Personen. Die Untersuchung analysiert diese Naturmotivik als komplexes Zeichensystem. Die Entwicklung dieses Erzählverfahrens, die von Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert zur psychologischen Darstellungsknst in der Gothic Novel (Radcliffe, Maturin) und im viktorianischen Roman (Brontë Sisters, Dickens) und zur Naturphilosophie Thomas Hardys führt, wird an Textbeispielen nachgezeichnet.