Birte Christ Livres

This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.

The nineteenth-century genre of domestic fiction continues to perform important cultural work for women readers in the early twentieth century - this is the argument of 'Modern Domestic Fiction'. Discussing texts by Dorothy Canfield, Zona Gale, and Inez Haynes Irwin, this study demonstrates how between 1905 and 1925 domestic fiction took a central role in promulgating popular feminist ideas, creating a mass magazine market geared to women, and shaping new middle-class identity.

This book asks if Barack Obama's election as the 44th President of the United States represented a paradigmatic shift in the political and cultural tides. It works to move beyond a renewed acknowledgement of the extraordinary symbolic value of a black man having become president in a country still rife with racial problems. Specifically, 'Obama and the Paradigm Shift' investigates those areas of cultural politics in which Obama's election to the U. S. presidency were expected to make the greatest impact. These include racial politics, normative forms of masculinity and femininity, and an abatement of the divisiveness of the political climate. Outside of the United States, the volume questions the degree to which these phenomena have affected related areas in German culture. Adopting a trans-Atlantic perspective, 'Obama and the Paradigm Shift' reflects on ways the presidency has impacted on German cultural politics particularly regarding women in power and a politics of affect.

„American Studies/Shifting Gears“ brings together contributions by younger scholars from Germany and by renowned colleagues from both sides of the Atlantic. Taking the debate about the „Futures of American Studies“ as its point of departure, the volume addresses three larger issues that are crucial to the present and the future positioning of the field: first, the internationalization of the American Studies scholarly community and of scholarly exchange as well as the transnationalization of the field's objects of study; second, interdisciplinary collaborations and transdisciplinary approaches and research; and third, the politics and politicalness of American Studies. „American Studies/Shifting Gears“ leads the reader expertly and creatively through what's at stake for the discipline. In its reflections and analyses, the volume slows down at times, then speeds up a little, halts and finds a resting-point, drives down slopes and up steep inclines, and, in the process, shifts gears.