The Myths That Made America

$35.00

This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this second revised and expanded edition will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.

Cover image for The Myths That Made America, isbn: 9783837677645

Anthropocene Affordances

$67.00

The current historical moment, often referred to as the Anthropocene, is defined by profound human influence on the planetary system. Lena Pfeifer examines how contemporary US-American literature negotiates the scalar and formal challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Connecting new formalist approaches with scale critique, she develops the concept of »Anthropocene affordances« as a new methodological framework for analyzing narrative responses to the recent ecological crisis. Through theoretical discussion and close readings, the study discusses how contemporary writers reconfigure conventional forms and narrative strategies to critically discuss the role of the human as a geological force.

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Stereotypically Autistic?

$67.00

Fictional representations of autism hold immense power over social perception, and yet such portrayals often remain stereotypical and one-sided. Based on discourse theory, Eva Charlotte Hesse explores the origins of autism stereotypes with regard to ideas of normality and deviance, their impact on the lives of autistic individuals, and the controversy surrounding autism definition. She offers criteria for the evaluation of autism portrayals while also pointing out prejudices and underlying power structures in the light of new medical findings, thus providing a critical perspective on current developments within the autism discourse.

Cover image for Stereotypically Autistic?, isbn: 9783837678918

Ecopoetic Place-Making

$45.00

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

Hydropoetics

$55.00

Water is our most precious resource and an element of culture historically charged with diverse meanings and values. Through the symbolic realms of literature, film, and visual arts, the contributors to this volume explore how the humanities can contribute to a critical understanding of human-water-power relationships and transform the debates on water dominated by natural sciences and techno-economical concerns. Examining the underrepresented cultural arenas in the socialist spaces of Eastern Europe, they focus on a variety of media and artistic practices. The late socialist era manifests as formative for the environmental discourses tied into local political and social contexts.

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Aquatic Environments

$49.00

From pre-Columbian times till today, human interventions in aquatic environments have been shaping the geopolitics of Latin America. The contributors to this volume examine the relationship between water and politics in Latin America via readings of fiction and poetry by both renowned and upcoming writers. Through close literary analysis, they demonstrate how water functions as a medium for narrating submerged histories and for unsettling (post)colonial assumptions. The volume reveals literary strategies that make it possible to share knowledge about other ways of organizing life in aquatic environments.

Cover image for Aquatic Environments, isbn: 9783837675078

Autosociobiography

$60.00

Autosociobiography, a term coined by nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux, is recognized as a productive literary phenomenon at the intersection of literary representation, social analysis and political commentary. The contributors to this volume trace the global entanglements of autosociobiographical texts, especially the historical, social and transcultural dynamics they discuss, represent and perform. They critically engage with the question of how to expand the scope of autosociobiography beyond its current corpus and class narratives to include other forms of social exclusion and stratification.

Cover image for Autosociobiography, isbn: 9783837672589

Powerful Prose

$55.00

What makes a reading experience »powerful«? This volume brings together literary scholars, linguists, and empirical researchers who tackle the question by investigating the effects and reader responses generated by selected extracts of literary prose. The twelve contributions theorize this widely-used, but to date insufficiently studied notion, and provide insights into the therefore still mysterious-seeming power of literary fiction. The collection explores a variety of stylistic as well as readerly and psychological features responsible for short- and long-term effects – topics of great interest to those interested or specialized in literary studies and narratology, (cognitive) stylistics, empirical literary studies and reader response theory.

»Truth« and Fiction

$55.00

Several of the most prolific and influential conspiracy theories have originated in Eastern Europe. The far reaching influence of conspiracy narratives can be observed in recent developments in Poland or with regard to the wars waged in Eastern Ukraine and in former Yugoslavia. This volume analyses the history behind this widespread phenomenon as well the role it has played in Eastern European cultures and literature both past and present.

andererseits - Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies

$50.00

andererseits provides a forum for research, commentary, and creative work on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, and traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. In addition, we welcome contributions by journalists, librarians, archivists, and other commentators interested in German Studies broadly conceived. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels. This issue features contributions by Leo A. Lensing, Norman M. Klein, Jens M. Gurr, and Julia Faisst.

andererseits - Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies

The Novel in the Spanish Silver Age

$60.00

What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, José Calvo Tello combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, this study analyzes a newly developed corpus of 358 Spanish novels of the silver age (1880-1939), which includes authors like Baroja, Pardo Bazán, or Valle-Inclán. Calvo Tello's key result is a graph-based model of literary genre that reconciles recent theoretical approaches.

Cultures of Economy in South-Eastern Europe

$50.00

The ubiquitous »cultural turn« of the 1990s did not spare the thinkers of economics – however, at the same time, economic topics have gained a new importance in cultural studies. This volume focuses on cultures of economy in regions of former Yugoslavia as part of South-Eastern Europe, supported by theoretical perspectives. It examines narratives and poetics of economy in literature, film, and art, as well as in public discourse. The contributors spotlight different historical periods: the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, Socialist Yugoslavia and the transitional and neoliberal period since the 1990s.

Cultures of Economy in South-Eastern Europe

Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Seventeenth Century Women's Visionary Writings

$45.00

In medieval and early modern times, female visionary writers used the mode of prophecy to voice their concerns and ideas, against the backdrop of cultural restrictions and negative stereotypes. In this book, Deborah Frick analyses medieval visionary writings by Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in comparison to seventeenth-century visionary writings by authors such as Anna Trapnel, Mary Carey, Anne Wentworth and Katherine Chidley, in order to investigate how these women authorised themselves in their writings and what topoi they use to find a voice and place of their own. This comparison, furthermore, and the strikingly similar topoi that are used by the female visionaries not only allows to question and examine topics such as authority, authorship, images of voice and body; it also breaks down preconceived and artificial boundaries and definitions.

Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Seventeenth Century Women's Visionary Writings

From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

$85.00

This study of contemporary literature from the former Yugoslavia (Post-Yugoslavia) follows the ways in which the feminist writing of gender, body, sexuality, and social and cultural hierarchies brings to light the past of socialist Yugoslavia, its cultural and literary itineraries and its dissolution in the Yugoslav wars. The analysis also focuses on the particularities of different feminist writings, together with their picturing of possible futures. The title of the book suggests an attempt to interpret post-Yugoslav literature as feminist writing, but also a process of conceptualizing a post-Yugoslav literary field, in this study represented by contemporary fiction from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia.

From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent

Dramatic Disgust

$50.00

Aesthetic disgust is a key component of most classic works of drama because it has much more potential than to simply shock the audience. This first extensive study on dramatic disgust places this sensation among pity and fear as one of the core emotions that can achieve katharsis in drama. The book sets out in antiquity and traces the history of dramatic disgust through Kant, Freud, and Kristeva to Sarah Kane's in-yer-face theatre. It establishes a framework to analyze forms and functions of disgust in drama by investigating its different cognates (miasma, abjection, etc.). Providing a concise argument against critics who have discredited aesthetic disgust as juvenile attention-grabbing, Sarah J. Ablett explains how this repulsive emotion allows theatre to dig deeper into what it means to be human.

Comparative Practices

$55.00

Comparisons not only prove fundamental in the epistemological foundation of modernity (Foucault, Luhmann), but they fulfil a central function in social life and the production of art. Taking a cue from the Practice Turn in sociology, the contributors are investigating the role of comparative practices in the formation of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The book conceives of social practices of comparing as being entrenched in networks of circulation of bodies, artefacts, discourses, and ideas, and aims to investigate how such practices ordered and changed British literature and culture during the long eighteenth century.

London, Queer Spaces and Historiography in the Works of Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst

$75.00

Queer spaces are crucial for the construction of LGBTQ+ communities, as they constitute places where queer subjects can create political, social, and affective alliances. Júlia Braga Neves shows how these spaces are pivotal for the representation of queer history in the fictional works by the British authors Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst, whose characters and plots are articulated through and within London's sexual geographies. Considering the intersection between gender, sexuality, and class, this study engages with spatial, queer, feminist, and Marxist theories as a means to reflect on London, queer historiography, and the relationship between subject and urban space.

London, Queer Spaces and Historiography in the Works of Sarah Waters and Alan Hollinghurst

The Supernatural Media Virus

$55.00

Since the 1990s, the virus and the network metaphors have become increasingly popular, finding application in a broad range of everyday discourses, academic disciplines, and fiction genres. In this book, Rahel Sixta Schmitz defines and discusses a trope recurring in Gothic fiction: the supernatural media virus. This trope comprises the confluence of the virus, the network, and a deep, underlying media anxiety. This study shows how Gothic narratives such as House of Leaves or The Ring feature the supernatural media virus to negotiate as well as actively shape imaginations of the network society and the dangers of a globalized, technologized world.

Home/Fronts

$55.00

In recent years, the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have had an impact on the UK rivalled only by Brexit and the global financial crisis. For people at home, the wars were ever-present in the media yet remained distant and difficult to apprehend. Janina Wierzoch offers an analytical survey of British contemporary war narratives in novels, drama, film, and television that seek to make sense of the experience. The study shows how the narratives, instead of reflecting on the UK`s role as invader, portray war as invading the British home. Home loses its post-Cold War sense of »permanent peace« and is recast as a home/front where war once again becomes part of what it means to be »us«.

Bouncing Back: Queer Resilience in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century English Literature and Culture

$45.00

LGBTQ people have strategies of resilience at their disposal to help them deal with the challenge that heteronormativity as a power structure poses to their affective lives. This book makes the concept of resilience available to queer literary and cultural studies, analysing these strategies in terms of narration, performance, bodies, and space. Resilience turns out to be a highly interactive mode of being in the world, which can set free creative energy as well as draw inspiration and energy from artistic work. Authors and artists discussed include Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Cunningham, and Ian McKellen.

Bouncing Back: Queer Resilience in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century English Literature and Culture

Narcissistic Mothers in Modernist Literature

$35.00

Narcissistic mothers are an important motif in modernist literature. Tracing its appearance in the works of writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, this book questions the dichotomous image of either benevolent or suffocating mother, which has pervaded religion, art and literature for centuries. Instead of focusing on the mother-child dyad as characterized primarily by maternal domination and the child' s submission, Marie Géraldine Rademacher insists on the definitional nuances of the term »narcissism« and considers the political and socio-economic context of the time in shaping these women's narcissistic behavior. The study thus inspires a more positive (re)reading of the protagonists.

Narcissistic Mothers in Modernist Literature

Post-Apartheid Criticism

$60.00

South Africa's post-apartheid narrative is one of democracy and equality – but its flaws run deep, argues Ives S. Loukson. Disclosing prejudices about whiteness, homosexuality and democracy in the »staged society«, he claims the concept of relation as an adequate framework for the embodiment of »profane democracy« understood in Agambian terms. Its fluidity is equated to openness and transparency that are relevant dimensions for profane democracy. A demonstration of literary criticism practiced as a fecund interdisciplinary activity, Loukson's study lays the foundation for post-apartheid criticism different from post-colonial criticism.

andererseits - Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies

$45.00

andererseits seeks to provide a forum for unique and exciting research and reflections on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, and traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. In addition, contributions by journalists, librarians, archivists, and other commentators interested in German Studies broadly conceived. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels.
Contributors to this volume: Yvonne Delhey, Andreas Erb, Bernhard Fischer, Rüdiger Görner, Spencer Hawkins, Steffen Kaup, Selim Özdogan, Hugh Ridley, Gertrud Maria Rösch, Peter Stamm, Wim Wenders, and others.

The Transformative Potential of Black British and British Muslim Literature

$55.00

This study investigates power, belonging and exclusion in British society by analysing representations of the mosque, the University of Oxford, and the plantation in novels by Leila Aboulela, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Diran Adebayo, David Dabydeen, Andrea Levy, and Bernardine Evaristo.
Lisa Ahrens combines Foucault's theory of heterotopia with elements of Wolfgang Iser's reader-response theory to work out Black British and British Muslim literature's potential for destabilising exclusionary boundaries. In this way, new perspectives open up on the intersections between space, power and literature, intertwining and enriching the discourses of Cultural and Literary Studies.

The Transformative Potential of Black British and British Muslim Literature

Transgression and Subversion

$35.00

Is the pícaro, the roguish hero of early modern Spanish adventure fiction, a 'real man'? What position does he hold in the gender hierarchy of his fictional social context? Why is the pícara so 'non-female'? What effect has her gender constitution on her fictional social context?
In terms of a gendered subject, the picaresque figure has hardly been analyzed so far. Although scholars have recognized it as a transgressive and subversive model, the 'queer' effect of the figure is yet to be examined. With regard to the categories of class, generation, topography, and gender, the contributions assembled in this volume explore Spanish, French, English, and German novels narratologically from the perspective of culture and gender theories.

Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Migration of Ideas

$60.00

As a writer, critic, and philosopher, Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911) left a lasting imprint on Polish culture. He absorbed virtually all topical intellectual trends of his time, adapting them for the needs of what he saw as his primary mission: the modernization of Polish culture. The essays of the volume reassess and contextualize Brzozowski's writings from a distinctly transnational vantage point. They shed light on often surprising and hitherto underrated affinities between Brzozowski and intellectual figures and movements in Eastern and Western Europe. Furthermore, they explore the presence of his ideas in twentieth-century century literary criticism and theory.

Stanislaw Brzozowski and the Migration of Ideas

Are We Comparing Yet?

$45.00

Debates about the possibility of an open culture – or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture – often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons.
Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, politics, philosophy), Haun Saussy calls out the typical vices of comparison and proposes ways to unseat them. For however much it is abused, distorted, and manipulated, comparison retains an essential link to the idea of justice.

History's Queer Stories

$45.00

Critical analysis of the dramatisation of homosexuality in British fiction about the Second World War is noticeable only by its relative absence from the field. Whereas feminist literary criticism has broadened the canon of war fiction to include narratives by and about women, queer scholars have seldom focused on literary representations of homosexuality during the war. Natalie Marena Nobitz closes a glaring gap in the critical attention of four novels dealing with the disruption of gender roles and institutionalised heteronormativity: Walter Baxter's Look Down in Mercy (1951), Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953), Sarah Waters'
The Night Watch (2006) and Adam Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012).

Philology in the Making

$40.00

Philological practices have served to secure and transmit textual sources for centuries. However – this volume contends –, it is only in the light of the current radical media change labeled ›digital turn‹ that the material and technological prerequisites of the theory and practice of philology become fully visible. The seventeen studies by scholars from the universities of Budapest and Cologne assembled here investigate these recent transformations of our techniques of writing and reading by critically examining core approaches to the history and epistemology of the humanities. Thus, a broad praxeological overview of basic cultural techniques of collective memory is unfolded.

Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling

$40.00

Second-person storytelling is a continually present and diverse technique in the history of literature that appears only once in the oeuvre of an author. Based on key narratives of the post-war period, Evgenia Iliopoulou approaches the phenomenon in an inductive way, starting out from the essentials of grammar and rhetoric, and aims to improve the general understanding of second-person narrative within literature. In its various forms and typologies, the second person amplifies and expands the limits of representation, thus remaining a narrative enigma: a small narrative gesture – with major narrative impact.

Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling

Fictions of Legibility

$60.00

Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By including discussions from the medical sciences, epistemology, and aesthetics, the book draws out the multi-faceted permutations of corporeal legibility, as well as its relevance for the development of the novel and for facilitating inter-disciplinary dialogue.

Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik

$15.99

Die Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik
(ZiG) trägt dem Umstand Rechnung, dass sich in der nationalen und internationalen Germanistik Interkulturalität als eine leitende und innovative Forschungskategorie etabliert hat. Sie greift aktuelle Fragestellungen im Bereich der germanistischen Literatur-, Kultur- und Sprachwissenschaft auf und möchte dazu beitragen, die unterschiedlichen Tendenzen und Trends der Interkulturalitätsforschung zu bündeln und ihre theoretischen Voraussetzungen weiter zu vertiefen. Insofern das Forschungsparadigma der Interkulturalität prinzipiell nicht mehr einzelfachlich gedacht werden kann, versteht sich die Zeitschrift bewusst als ein interdisziplinär und komparatistisch offenes Organ, das sich im internationalen Wissenschaftskontext verortet sieht.
Die ZiG erscheint zweimal jährlich.

Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik

$15.99

Das Themenheft 2014 der »Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik«, herausgegeben von Irina Wutsdorff (Tübingen) und Stepan Zbytovsky (Prag), ist dem Thema »Übersetzen. Praktiken kulturellen Transfers am Beispiel Prags« gewidmet.
Das Prag der Jahrhundertwende und des beginnenden 20. Jahrhunderts war ein Ort mehrerer Sprachen, Ethnien und kultureller Orientierungen. Die Beiträge zeigen: Dem Übersetzen nicht nur als Akt der Vermittlung oder Adaption, sondern auch der Transformation, möglicherweise der Usurpation, schließlich der Verfremdung oder gar Ablehnung kommt in einer derartigen Konstellation eine entscheidende Rolle zu. Denn jede kulturelle Positionierung innerhalb dieses polyvalenten Geflechts erfolgt geradezu zwangsläufig in Aneignung oder Abgrenzung von anderen Optionen. Übersetzen wird deshalb neueren kulturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen entsprechend in einem breiten Sinn als Praxis kulturellen Transfers verstanden.

Actors and Networks in the Megacity

$40.00

This study is a concise introduction to Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory and its application in a literary analysis of urban narratives of the 21st century. We encounter well-known psycho-geographers such as Iain Sinclair and Sam Miller, and renowned authors, Patrick Neate and Suketu Mehta. Prachi More analyses these authors' accounts of vastly different cities such as London, Delhi, Mumbai, Johannesburg, New York and Tokyo. Are these urban narratives a contemporary solution to documenting an ever-evasive urban reality? If so, how do they embody "matters of concern" as Latour would have put it, laying bare modern-day "actors" and "networks" rather than reporting mere "matters of fact"? These questions are drawn into an inter-disciplinary discussion that addresses concerns and questions of epistemology, the sociology of knowledge as well as urban and documentary studies.

Fictocritical Strategies

$40.00

Gerrit Haas re-theorises the peculiar textual conduct of ficto/critical writing, which inextricably intersects fictional with critical discourses as well as aesthetics with poetics and ethics. The slash here signals the conjunction between a self-reflexive ficto-critical insight and a wider discursive ficto-critical motivation. In its refined form, this twofold trope shifts perspective from the prevalent generic between onto the meta-generic level of our textual practices. Ultimately, the ficto/critical is thus qualified as an unheard-of interventionist aesthetic of deconstruction directed at the ramifications of our textual cultures.

Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik

$15.99

Die Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik versammelt aktuelle Beiträge aus Literatur-, Kultur- und Sprachwissenschaft, die das zentrale Konzept der Interkulturalität weiterdenken.
Angesichts von Migrationsbewegungen und Globalisierung sind Transiträume von besonderer Aktualität. Die Beiträge in diesem Themenheft der Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik beleuchten anhand paradigmatischer Beispiele aus literarischen und nicht-literarischen Texten die Breite des Spektrums unterschiedlicher Transiträume: von Schiffen, Zügen und Varietés über politische Grenzräume und virtuelle Räume bis zu der Sprache der Lyrik oder dem Diskurs des Übersetzens.

Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik

$15.99

Die Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik
(ZiG) trägt dem Umstand Rechnung, dass sich in der nationalen und internationalen Germanistik Interkulturalität als eine leitende und innovative Forschungskategorie etabliert hat. Sie greift aktuelle Fragestellungen im Bereich der germanistischen Literatur-, Kultur- und Sprachwissenschaft auf und möchte dazu beitragen, die unterschiedlichen Tendenzen und Trends der Interkulturalitätsforschung zu bündeln und ihre theoretischen Voraussetzungen weiter zu vertiefen. Insofern das Forschungsparadigma der Interkulturalität prinzipiell nicht mehr einzelfachlich gedacht werden kann, versteht sich die Zeitschrift bewusst als ein interdisziplinär und komparatistisch offenes Organ, das sich im internationalen Wissenschaftskontext verortet sieht.
Die ZiG erscheint zweimal jährlich.

Born to be Criminal

$40.00

This collection of essays explores the continuities and disruptions in the perceptions of criminality, its causes and ways of fighting it in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union. It focuses on both the discourse on criminality and thus the conceptualisation of criminality in various disciplines (criminology, psychiatry, and literature), and penal practice, that is, different aspects of criminal law and anti-crime policy. Thus, the volume is markedly interdisciplinary, with authors representing a variety of approaches in history and literary studies, from social history to discourse analysis, from the history of sciences to text analysis.

The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

$40.00

With the advent of the reformation, concepts of living and dying were profoundly reconfigured. As purgatory disappeared from the spiritual landscape, other paths to the afterlife were rediscovered. Thus, when life draws to a close, the passage to the afterlife becomes a last pilgrimage, a popular early modern metaphor that has received little critical commentary. In a rigorous historical and theological reading, Cyril L. Caspar explores five major English poets – John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, George Herbert, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton – to unveil the poetical potential of the last pilgrimage as a life-transcending metaphor.

Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik

$15.99

Das Themenheft 2015 der »Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik«, herausgegeben von Natalia Blum-Barth (Mainz), ist dem Thema »Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit« gewidmet.
Im Zentrum stehen Werke von Sprachwechslern und zweisprachigen Autoren und das Hineinwirken der Erstsprache in die Literatursprache dieser Texte. Modelle der Interferenz der Sprachen im literarischen Werk werden beispielhaft erläutert sowie in den kultur- und literaturhistorischen Kontext eingeordnet. Des Weiteren werden Techniken des mehrsprachigen Schreibens (Übersetzung, Hybridisierung, Konvergenz, Sprachlatenz u.a.) herausgearbeitet und typologisiert. Schließlich wird gefragt, wie literarische Mehrsprachigkeit zur Entwicklung ästhetischer Konzepte und zur Herausbildung dichterischer Individualität beiträgt.

British White Trash

$40.00

"White trash" is a liminal figure that dramatizes the intersection of race and class. Contemporary British novelists like Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King use this originally US-American stereotype to interrogate the racializing discourse of class in British society. Their novels are interdiscursive reflections of the figurations of race and class that still haunt the British cultural imaginary.
"British White Trash" is the first analysis to comprehensively examine the adaptation of the "white trash" stereotype in major British novels. The study thus contributes to a critical understanding of racism and classism, its cultural representations and its underlying social processes.

Schreiben im Zwiegespräch / Writing as Dialogue

$43.00

Obwohl Praktiken des Lektorats und des Mentorats zum alltäglichen Bestandteil schriftstellerischer Tätigkeiten gehören, wurden sie von den Literaturwissenschaften bislang kaum untersucht.
Der bilinguale Band versammelt Akteure aus dem literarischen Feld sowie der Autorschafts- und Schreibprozesstheorie, welche die Öffnung des Schreibprozesses grundlegend reflektieren. Ihre Beiträge umfassen nicht nur Erfahrungsberichte von Autor_innen, Lektor_innen und Mentor_innen sowie Einblicke in Lehrmethoden des literarischen Schreibens an Hochschulen in verschiedenen Ländern Europas, sondern auch theoretische Ansätze zu einer intersubjektiven literarischen Praxis sowie Entwürfe für dialogische Literaturbegriffe im Zeitalter des Publizierens im Internet.

Although practices of editing and mentoring are part of an author's daily activities, they have previously been largely neglected by the literary studies.
The bilingual volume therefore assembles players from the fields of literary production and theories of authorship and the writing process, who discuss the development towards an opening up of the creative writing process. Their contributions encompass not only reports of experiences made by authors, editors, and mentors and insights into teaching methods applied in creative writing classes at higher education institutions in different European countries. They also explore theoretical approaches to an intersubjective literary practice as well as suggestions for the definition of a dialogic notion of literature in the age of online publishing.

Schreiben im Zwiegespräch / Writing as Dialogue

Exploring the Fantastic

$45.00

The fantastic represents a wide and heterogeneous field in literary, cultural, and media studies. Encompassing some of the field's foremost voices such as Fred Botting and Larissa Lai, as well as exciting new perspectives by junior scholars, this volume offers a mosaic of the fantastic now. The contributions pinpoint and discuss current developments in theory and practice by offering enlightening snapshots of the contemporary Anglophone landscape of research in the fantastic. The authors' arguments and analyses thus give new impetus to the field's theoretical and methodological approaches, its textual materials, its main interests, and its crucial findings.

Creating Communities

$35.00

How does historical reality interrelate with fiction? And how much are readers themselves involved in the workings of fictional literature? With innovative interpretations of various well-known texts, Nourit Melcer-Padon introduces the use of literary masks and illustrates literature's engagement of its readers' ethical judgement. She promotes a new perception of literary theory and of connections between thinkers such as Iser, Castoriadis, Sartre, Jung and Neumann. The book offers a unique view on the role of the community in post-existentialist modern cultural reality by emphasizing the importance of ritual practices in literature as a cultural manifestation.

andererseits - Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies

$40.00

andererseits is a collaborative project undertaken by students and faculties of universities in the USA (Duke and the University of Notre Dame), in Luxembourg (University of Luxembourg), and in Germany (University of Duisburg-Essen). It provides a forum for research and reflection on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, as well as traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels.
This edition features contributions by Carsten Dutt, Klaus Modick, Tanja Nusser, Thomas Pfau, Margarethe von Trotta, and others.

Practicing and Placing Imaginaries

$60.00

The contributors to this volume explore the intertwined relationship of imagining and practicing from different fields of study (sociology, philosophy, literary and cultural studies), complementing practice and theoretical approaches with interdisciplinary insights into the entanglements of doings and imaginations. They build a bridge between sociological research and cultural studies and thus challenge perspectives which characterize imagining as an individual and solitary activity. Rather, imagining is situated and shaped by its placement in specific contexts and communities.

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Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik

$15.99

Die Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik
(ZiG) trägt dem Umstand Rechnung, dass sich in der nationalen und internationalen Germanistik Interkulturalität als eine leitende und innovative Forschungskategorie etabliert hat. Sie greift aktuelle Fragestellungen im Bereich der germanistischen Literatur-, Kultur- und Sprachwissenschaft auf und möchte dazu beitragen, die unterschiedlichen Tendenzen und Trends der Interkulturalitätsforschung zu bündeln und ihre theoretischen Voraussetzungen weiter zu vertiefen. Insofern das Forschungsparadigma der Interkulturalität prinzipiell nicht mehr einzelfachlich gedacht werden kann, versteht sich die Zeitschrift bewusst als ein interdisziplinär und komparatistisch offenes Organ, das sich im internationalen Wissenschaftskontext verortet sieht.
Die ZiG erscheint zweimal jährlich.

Writing Facts

$50.00

»Fact« is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering »writing facts« and »writing facts«, the volume shows why and how »facts« are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity.

Fear of Aging

$55.00

In the genre of horror, elderly people are often used as a trope to evoke both a fear of death and a fear of aging. Old age is therefore equated with bodily, mental, or social decline. The contributors of this book investigate what exactly we are afraid of when we posit old age as a source of horror. The aim is to harness the thrills and pleasures of horror to think about how quality of life can be improved in old age and how elderly people can be better integrated in our ever fearful and suspicious societies.

On Making Fiction

$55.00

Fiction is generally understood to be a fascinating, yet somehow deficient affair, merely derivative of reality. What if we could, instead, come up with an affirmative approach that takes stories seriously in their capacity to bring forth a substance of their own? Iconic texts such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its numerous adaptations stubbornly resist our attempts to classify them as mere representations of reality. Friederike Danebrock shows how these texts insist that we take them seriously as agents and interlocutors in our world- and culture-making activities. Drawing on this analysis, she develops a theory of narrative fiction as a generative practice.

Pandemic Protagonists

$45.00

During the first mandatory lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, citizens worldwide turned to »pandemic fictions« or started to produce their own »Corona Fictions« across different media. These accounts of (previously) experienced or imagined health crises feature a great variety of protagonists and their (re)actions in response to the exceptional circumstances. The contributors to this volume take a closer look at different pandemic protagonists in fictional narratives relating to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as in existing pandemic fictions. Thereby they provide new insights into pandemic narratives from a cultural, literary, and media studies perspective from antiquity to today.

Siegfried the Wrestler

$45.00

Continually attacked by government officials and educators, installment or colportage novels fascinated their underprivileged readers. Melodrama and sensation were essential ingredients. The hurriedly written, rambling plots sought to electrify fantasies of women with new turn-of-the-century aspirations. They also fused raw political ideas offering populist and paternalist solutions to society's challenges and tensions. Through the study of one rare, surviving colportage novel, Peter S. Fisher offers an unusual mental and visual panorama of a nearly vanished Wilhelmine world.

andererseits – Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies

$60.00

andererseits provides a forum for research, commentary, and creative work on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, and traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. In addition, we welcome contributions by journalists, librarians, archivists, and other commentators interested in German Studies broadly conceived. As a specifically transatlantic endeavor, we also highlight select topics in American Studies that impact German Studies. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels.
This issue features sections about German Studies approaches to media literacy, Stephen Dowden's book »Modernism and Mimesis« and the poetics of ambiguous memory.

Touching Spaces in Textures

$60.00

Touch has many layers of meaning, especially so in the affectivity unleashed by humor, where touching spaces often emerge in deconstructive ways that affect the senses, alter sense-making, and generate productive forms of non-knowledge (NichtWissen) and power-lessness (OhnMacht). The study discusses the works of various thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Helmuth Plessner, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, bell hooks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Achim Geisenhanslüke. Drawing on such critical theories and poetically generated epistemologies of literary works the study illuminates venues for transformative thought while also paying attention to the ethics of dialogicity and the relation between philosophy and literature.

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Writing Romantic Climate Change

$55.00

In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.

Queer and Feminist Relationships in Contemporary Fiction

$55.00

Relationships play a crucial role in feminist and queer fictions of the 21st century, whether we think of the connection among the artists and between them and their audience or the interaction of the characters or different modes of writing. The contributors to this volume analyze and map these friendly, amorous, sexual, political and artistic contacts within and around contemporary fictions of Romance cultures. They show how these works question, challenge and rethink circulating concepts of relationships and implement them aesthetically. This volume integrates contributions from feminist, queer and decolonial studies just as sociology of art.

Queer and Feminist Relationships in Contemporary Fiction

Beyond the Original

$60.00

Can DeepL and ChatGPT translate Shakespeare? The recent developments in AI present a timely opportunity to look at the concept of literary translation anew. The contributors to this volume delve into the playful and performative nature of translations that embrace ambiguity, confusion, and even failure. In doing so, they go beyond the conventional view of translation as a reproduction of the original. Highlighting translations that faced criticism or went unnoticed, the contributors offer a new perspective on well-known authors by looking at their lesser-known translated texts.

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Rootedness and Acculturation

$55.00

German-Americans represent the largest self-declared ancestry group in the United States of America. The period from the 200th anniversary celebration of Germantown's founding in 1883 to the end of the First World War was an age of intense turmoil within the ranks of German-American communities. These decades were marked by a massive political and cultural realignment as well as major contributions to the (self-)definition of German-Americanness. Historians and sociolinguists with backgrounds in German or American studies offer a fresh look at a critical period in the history of German-American communities.

Mediating the Real

$55.00

As a literary genre, the nonfictional reportage has particular implications for the role of the writer. Pascal Sigg shows how six U.S. American writers, including David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, reflect on themselves as human media in their reportage. The writers assert themselves in a postmodern way by scrutinizing their own mediation. As it also traces and develops the theorization of reportage as genre along the reporters' early concerns with technical media, this pioneering contribution to literary journalism studies paves a way for a new materialist approach in the under-researched field.

World Construction via Networking

$75.00

With the mainstream's growing acceptance of worlds and storytelling spread among several different texts – e.g., films, television series, novels, and comics – this pioneering study employs a multidisciplinary approach combining transmediality, network theory, and narratology to analyze the narrative network of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In this analysis, Christopher Hansen thoroughly examines storytelling techniques while providing a fresh theoretical framework to develop a structural model for interconnected narratives. He redefines our understanding of narrative dynamics in one of the most successful cinematic franchises of all time.

Ethics for the Future

$60.00

Which of the possible futures might be a good future, and how do we know? Stephanie Bender looks at contemporary films and novels to address major ethical challenges of the future: the ecological catastrophe, digitalisation and biotechnology. She proposes that fiction and its modes of aesthetic simulation and emotional engagement offer a different way of knowing and judging possible futures. From a critical posthumanist angle, she discusses works ranging from Don DeLillo's Zero K (2017) and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013) to Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 as well as Avatar (2009), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) among many others.

Reading Race Relationally

$55.00

What does it mean to write African American literature after the end of legalized segregation? In this study of Colson Whitehead's first six novels, Marlon Lieber argues that this question has permeated the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's writing since his 1999 debut The Intuitionist. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology and Marxist critical theory, Lieber shows that Whitehead's oeuvre articulates the tension between the persistent presence of racism and transformations in the United States' class structure, which reveals new modes of abjection. At the same time, Whitehead imagines forms of writing that strive to transcend the histories of domination objectified in social structures and embodied in the form of habitus.

Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

$54.99

We live in a critical moment in history, often called the »Anthropocene«, that is defined by unprecedented scales of uncertainty. Natalie Dederichs draws on insights from the new materialisms about the entangled nature of planetary existence and combines them with approaches to aesthetics from fields as diverse as reader-response criticism, phenomenology, Gothic and media studies. She introduces a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality as a necessary component of any ecological engagement with fiction that fully embraces literary encounters with the inaccessible and elusive as expressed in uncanny atmospheric reading experiences.

Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction

Putting Age in its Place

$55.00

How are long-term residential care and the construction of late-life identities connected in North American film and fiction? Through close readings of works by Margaret Atwood, Joan Barfoot, Oscar Casares, John Mighton, and several others, Ulla Kriebernegg explores how the setting at the nexus of home, hospital, hotel, and prison functions in the newly emerging genre of the care home novel. What role does this setting play for the narrative construction of old age, and what hopes and fears are revealed? Kriebernegg argues that the spatiality of aging needs to be included into discussions of late life agency and care in the face of vulnerability.

Beyond Narrative

$55.00

This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years.

Imaging the Scenes of War

$45.00

In American visual culture, the 1930s and 1940s were a key transitional period shaped by the era of modernism and the global confrontation of World War II. Christof Decker demonstrates that the war and its iconography of destruction challenged visual artists to find new ways of representing its consequences. Dealing with trauma and war crimes led to the emergence of complex aesthetic forms and media crossovers. Decker shows that the 1940s were a pivotal period for the creation of horrific yet also innovative representations that boosted American visual modernism and set the stage for debates about the ethics of visual culture in the post-9/11 era.

The Poetics and Politics of Invective Humor

$50.00

Vituperation, disparagement, and debasement seem to have become part of the mainstream discourse in contemporary US-American media culture. Zooming in on a distinct televisual comedy genre, Katja Schulze explores the formal principles, media-specific realizations, and the cultural work of disparagement in contemporary female-led situation comedies. Subsequently, larger patterns of (gender-based) invective strategies and conventions that define the dynamism of this comedic genre come into view. Her study outlines case studies of popular sitcoms, like Parks and Recreation, Mike & Molly, and the revival of hit-sitcom Roseanne, thereby unearthing how the shows are able to stage humor as mass-mediated deprecation – a signifying practice with its own poetics and politics.

The Poetics and Politics of Invective Humor

Biohacking, Bodies and Do-It-Yourself

$40.00

From self-help books and nootropics, to self-tracking and home health tests, to the tinkering with technology and biological particles – biohacking brings biology, medicine, and the material foundation of life into the sphere of »do-it-yourself«. This trend has the potential to fundamentally change people's relationship with their bodies and biology but it also creates new cultural narratives of responsibility, authority, and differentiation. Covering a broad range of examples, this book explores practices and representations of biohacking in popular culture, discussing their ambiguous position between empowerment and requirement, promise and prescription.

Global Curriculum Development

$55.00

How can higher education empower students as agents of the social transformations that our societies need so urgently? Linn Friedrichs connects John Dewey's education theory, current research on globalization, and inclusive curriculum design approaches to propose a new educational model for our age of complexity, crisis, and innovation. Drawing lessons from NYU's efforts to globalize its research, pedagogy, and social impact, she presents building blocks for a new curricular core that is structured around the key challenges of our time and the competencies of »complexity resilience«. It becomes the essential foundation for action-oriented partnerships across cultural, disciplinary, generational, and institutional boundaries.

Black Travel Writing

$55.00

What does it mean for Black diasporic writers to travel to Africa? Focusing on the period between the 1990s and 2010s, Isabel Kalous examines autobiographical narratives of travel to Africa by African American and Black British authors. She places the texts within the long tradition of Black diasporic engagement with the continent, scrutinizes the significance of Black mobility, and demonstrates that travel writing serves as a means to negotiate questions of identity, belonging, history, and cultural memory. To provide a framework for the analyses of contemporary narratives, her study outlines the emergence, development, and key characteristics of the multifaceted genre of Black travel writing. Authors discussed include, among others, Saidiya Hartman, Barack Obama, and Caryl Phillips.

Resilience Stories

$70.00

Be resilient! Today, we hear this line in almost any context. The term resilience is among the most repeated buzzwords. But why, simply, do we need to be resilient? Hamideh Mahdiani presents answers to this question by challenging a reductionistic understanding of resilience from single disciplinary perspectives; by questioning the dominance of life sciences in defining an age-old concept; and by problematizing the neglected role of life writing in fostering resilience. In so doing, through a multidisciplinary frame of reference, the book works with various examples from life writing and life sciences, and testifies to the focal role of narrative studies in resilience research.

The Wealthy, the Brilliant, the Few

$55.00

How does the US make sense of its elite educational system, given that it seems to be at odds with core American values, such as equality of opportunity or upward mobility? Sophie Spieler explores scholarly and journalistic investigations, self-representational texts, and fictional narratives revolving around the Ivy League and its peers in order to understand elite education and its peculiar position in American cultural discourse. Among the book's most surprising and groundbreaking insights is the tenacity and adaptability of meritocratic ideology across all three sub-discourses, despite its fundamental incompatibility with the American educational system.

Culture^2

$40.00

How to do cultural studies in the twenty-first century? This essay collection is not a handbook, encyclopedia, or a »state of the field« compendium. Instead, it is a reflexive exercise in cultural studies, featuring fifteen accessible essays on a selection of critical key works published since 2000. The contributors aim to provide readers with a fresh and engaging look at recent criticism, exploring the interdisciplinary traffic of theories, methods, and ideas within the field of cultural and literary studies. This book shows how the work of Lauren Berlant, Rita Felski, Fred Moten, Anna Tsing, and others can inspire new thinking and theorizing for the twenty-first century.

21st Century Retro: "Mad Men" and 1960s America in Film and Television

$50.00

Numerous contemporary televisual productions revisit the past but direct their energies towards history's non-events and anti-heroic subjectivities. Debarchana Baruah offers a vocabulary to discuss these, using Mad Men as a primary case study and supplementing the analysis with other examples from the US and around the world. She takes a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to studying film and television, drawing from history, memory, and nostalgia discourses, and layering them with theories of intertextuality, paratexts, and actor-networks. The book's compositions style invites discussions from scholars of various fields, as well as those who are simply fans of history or of Mad Men.

21st Century Retro: "Mad Men" and 1960s America in Film and Television

Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self

$50.00

The body has become central to practices of self-tracking. By focusing on the relations between quantification, the body, and labor, this volume sheds light on the ways in which discourses on data collection and versions of the ›corporate self‹ are instrumental in redefining concepts of labor, including notions of immaterial and free labor in an increasingly virtual work environment. The contributions explore the functions of quantification in conceptualizing the body as a laboring body and examine how quantification contributes to disciplining the body. By doing so, they also inquire how practices of self-tracking, self-monitoring, and self-optimization have evolved historically.

Savage Horrors

$55.00

The American Gothic novel has been deeply shaped by issues of race and raciality from its origins in British Romanticism to the American Gothic novel in the twenty-first century. Savage Horrors delineates an intrinsic raciality that is discursively sedimented in the Gothic's uniquely binary structure. Corinna Lenhardt uncovers the destructive and lasting impact of the Gothic's anti-Black racism on the cultural discourses in the United States. At the same time, Savage Horrors traces the unflinching Black resistance back to the Gothic's intrinsic raciality. The African American Gothic, however, does not originate there but in the Black Atlantic – roughly a decade before the first Gothic novel was ever written on American soil.

Subjects of Substance

$45.00

Recent U.S. literature has both been informed by, and critically engaged with, materialist conceptions of selfhood. Over the past decades, disciplines like neuroscience and evolutionary biology have increasingly recast the human self as a malleable construct produced by physiological processes. In a parallel development, literary authors have created their own conceptions of somatic subjectivity in conjunction or contrast with scientific and medical discourses. Subjects of Substance examines the forms, functions, and effects of materialist models of mind in selected memoirs and novels. Authors discussed include Michael W. Clune, Don DeLillo, Kay Redfield Jamison, Siri Hustvedt, Richard Powers, Elyn R. Saks, and David Foster Wallace.

Creating Realities

$60.00

Business is woven into the very fabric of American life, yet rarely surfaces in the nation's literary history. Even in novels about business, it proves an elusive motif that fails to mirror actual business organizations.
This book argues that literary representations of business remain ineffable because business serves potential aesthetic functions, subtly yet meaningfully impacting readers. Exploring the complex representation of business in realist, naturalist and modernist works, Erhan Simsek reveals these functions by analyzing how the motif intertwines with social developments, literary movements and author biographies. He thus illuminates the motif itself while highlighting the utility of a focus on the changing functions of literature.

Belonging and Narrative

$40.00

Why did the novel become so popular in the past three centuries, and how did the American novel contribute to this trend? As a key provider of the narrative frames and formulas needed by modern individuals to give meaning and mooring to their lives. Drawing on phenomenological hermeneutics, human geography and social psychology, Laura Bieger contends that belonging is not a given; it is continuously produced by narrative. Against the current emphasis on metaphors of movement and destabilization, she explores the salience and significance of home. Challenging views of narrative as a mechanism of ideology, she approaches narrative as a practical component of dwelling in the world – and the novel a primary place-making agent.

The Ghosts Within

$45.00

The ghost as a literary figure has been interpreted multiple times: spiritually, psychoanalytically, sociologically, or allegorically. Following these approaches, Janna Odabas understands ghosts in Asian American literature as self-reflexive figures. With identity politics at the core of the ghost concept, Odabas emphasizes how ghosts critically renegotiate the notion of 'Asian America' as heterogeneous and transnational and resist interpretation through a morally or politically preconceived approach to Asian American literature. Responding to the tensions of the scholarly field, Odabas argues that the literary works under scrutiny openly play with and rethink conceptions of ghosts as mere exotic, ethnic ornamentation.

An Organon of Life Knowledge

$40.00

Can fiction teach us how to live? This study offers a fresh take on the North American short story, exploring how the genre has engaged in the construction and circulation of 'life knowledge'. Echoing the resurgence of short story scholarship in recent years, it thus contributes a genre-focused perspective to the growing field of 'literature and knowledge' studies. Drawing on stories from the late 19th century to the present by authors such as Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Junot Díaz, and Alice Munro, Michael Basseler examines how knowledge about life and how to live it is generically constituted and, vice versa, how literary genres such as the short story are embedded in broader cultural frameworks of knowledge production.

Fugitive Borders

$55.00

Fugitive Borders explores a new archive of 19th-century autobiographical writing by black authors in North America. For that purpose, Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly enslaved men in the 1850s that emerged in or around the historical region of Canada West (now known as Ontario) and that defy the genre conventions of the classic slave narrative. Instead, these texts demonstrate originality in expressing complex, often ambivalent attitudes towards the so-called Canadian Promised Land and contribute to a form of textual community-building across national borders. In the context of emerging national discourses before Canada's Confederation in 1867, they offer alternatives to the hegemonic narrative of the white settler nation.

The Myths That Made America

$30.00

This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man.
The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.

Beyond the Civil War Hospital

$55.00

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the »heart and the brain« only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's unique adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The book pairs female and male white authors from the antislavery North, and brings together a broad range of genres.

Sustainability and the American Naturalist Tradition

$100.00

Humanity is failing at solving complex socio-ecological problems like global climate change, biodiversity loss and population growth. The existing 'sustainable development' paradigm and its reliance on trade-offs between the three pillars of environment, economics, and equity is not robust enough to maintain global carrying capacity. In this timely intervention, Thomas argues that the holistic and transdisciplinary thinking of four iconic American naturalists – Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Edward O. Wilson – can instead help to solve our biggest twenty-first century challenges by synthesizing values from four eras of cultural and environmental history.

Sustainability and the American Naturalist Tradition

Epilepsy Metaphors

$40.00

Between 1990 and 2015, American literature saw the emergence of a new corpus of epilepsy metaphors which tackle the stigma of epilepsy within three areas: society, body, and language. Eleana Vaja introduces concepts such as protometaphors, relational metaphors, epileptic texts, and metastability to categorize and examine these foci further. Applying philosophy as well as "hard sciences" (i.e. mathematics, medicine, physics) to disability studies, her study of selected works by Siri Hustvedt, Thom Jones, Reif Larsen, Dennis Mahagin, Audrey Niffenegger, Rodman Philbrick, and Lauren Slater shows how epilepsy metaphors redefine the notion of the "liminal" and the "normal".

Melting Pots & Mosaics: Children of Immigrants in US-American Literature

$55.00

In the past decades, children of immigrants have drawn increased attention not only in press and media, but also in a number of academic fields, among them sociology, history, or ethnology. Surprisingly, literary and cultural studies have been somewhat more reluctant to approach the topic. While there is work on individual authors or, at the very most, particular ethnic groups, comparative approaches are rare.
This monograph aims to amend this. It provides an extensive discussion of US-American literature about children of immigrants, comparing different authors, different ethnic groups and different literary and historical contexts.

Melting Pots & Mosaics: Children of Immigrants in US-American Literature

Power Relations in Black Lives

$35.00

According to relational sociology, power imbalances are at the root of human conflicts and consequently shape the physical and symbolic struggles between interdependent groups or individuals. This volume highlights the role of power relations in the African American experience by applying key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias to black literature and culture. The authors offer new readings of power asymmetries as represented in works of canonical and contemporary black writers (Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead), rap music (e.g., Jay Z), images of black homelessness, and figurations of political activism (civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, #BlackLivesMatter in Ferguson).