Nassim Winnie Balestrini Livres

This study introduces the reader to the mostly unknown world of libretto adaptations of nineteenth-century American fiction. The analysis of stage works based on Washington Irving’s «Rip Van Winkle», Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Henry James’s Washington Square explores a largely unexamined area of the reception history of these authors and narratives. As opera and drama have been interlinked throughout American theater history, the discussion of adaptations will include multiple types of spoken and musical theater. Appendices documenting the existence of over 350 stage works based on nineteenth-century American fiction further illustrate how librettists, composers, and playwrights have participated in the endeavor to understand and contextualize literary texts within cultural history.

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.

As Linda Hutcheon writes in her afterword, this volume featuring contributions from scholars, teachers, and artists working in Canada, the United States, and Germany demonstrates „the manifest popularity“ and "the 'ubiquity' of adaptation as a contemporary cultural phenomenon - albeit one with roots going deep into the past." The opening theoretical essay shows how the interdisciplinary and global field of adaptation studies intersects with the transnational cultural studies trajectory within American studies. The volume probes the depths of narratives that have shuttled between multiple genres, cultures, languages, and eras, and highlights concerns shared by research and teaching. It includes and, in several instances, combines the perspectives of artists who practice adaptation, of researchers who analyze and contextualize adaptation, and of instructors who teach adaptation processes or use adaptation as a didactic tool.

In dieser Einführung in Vladimir Nabokovs narratives Werk werden seine im Original russischen und englischen Texte in textimmanentem Detail und vergleichend behandelt, so daß thematische Schwerpunkte und nicht reine Chronologie die Diskussion strukturieren. Zu diesen Themen gehören Nabokovs literarische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Phänomen Exil, mit Definitionen von Künstlertum, mit Kindheit, Elternsein, Verlust und Tod, mit den Grenzen zwischen Wirklichkeit und Vorstellung sowie zwischen dem eigenen Selbst und der Individualität anderer. Gerade der Vergleich von Werken der russischen Schaffensphase mit denjenigen, die er in englischer Sprache verfaßte, gewährt bei einer thematisch begründeten Struktur vielschichtige Einsichten. In die Analyse und Interpretation wird auch die internationale Nabokov-Forschung einbezogen.