"This book is a concise introduction to the major approaches, methods and terms in contemporary literary theory. It traces the development of literary theory from the late 19th to the early 21st century, from varieties of formalism to queer theory, postcolonial studies and ecocriticism. Written in a clear and accessible style, it helps readers to participate in current theoretical discussions and to use theory as a tool for exploring the fascinating complexities of literary texts."--Amazon.de.
Ingo Berensmeyer This book offers not only an introduction to a wide range of different approaches to the play but also an exemplary interpretation that combines the aesthetics of theatrical performance with aspects of literary and cultural history. The book includes recommendations for further reading, study questions and a chapter on exam preparation.
The exploration of literature's evolution highlights its transformation alongside various media and communication methods, from manuscripts to digital platforms. It emphasizes how literary experiences are intertwined with material forms, suggesting that literature adapts and evolves in response to these changing formats. By examining the interplay between tangible and intangible elements, the book provides a nuanced understanding of how literature engages the senses and reflects broader shifts in communication.
Focusing on the period between 1630 and 1700, the book examines the interplay between literary culture and the evolving material, epistemic, and political landscapes of England. Through case studies and close readings, it highlights the transition to neoclassicism, revealing its profound impact on various social practices and institutions, including poetry, politics, and notions of civility. This exploration underscores the seventeenth century as a transformative era in literary history.
Narrative Representations of Literary Authorship since 1800
Fictional novelists and other author characters have been a staple of novels and stories from the early nineteenth century onwards. What is it that attracts authors to representing their own kind in fiction? Author Fictions addresses this question from a theoretical and historical perspective. Narrative representations of literary authorship not only reflect the aesthetic convictions and social conditions of their actual authors or their time; they also take an active part in negotiating and shaping these conditions. The book unfolds the history of such ‘author fictions’ in European and North American texts since the early nineteenth century as a literary history of literary authorship, ranging from the Victorian bildungsroman to contemporary autofiction. It combines rhetorical and sociological approaches to answer the question how literature makes authors. Identifying ‘author fictions’ as narratives that address the fragile material conditions of literary creation in the actual and symbolic economies of production, Ingo Berensmeyer explores how these texts elaborate and manipulate concepts and models of authorship. This book will be relevant to English, American and comparative literary studies and to anyone interested in the topic of literary authorship.
What are the connections between literature and culture, and between literature and cultural change? Literature and its conventions are obviously subject to cultural change, and can be used as documentary evidence of particular aspects of culture and cultural change. But how are its aesthetic dimensions and cognitive affordances related to such change, both within the intrinsic dynamics of cultures as systems of signification and in the manifold contacts with other cultures? And how does literature itself contribute to cultural change? The essays in this volume examine the impact of cultural change on the evolution of literature, and they investigate how literature - from the early modern period to the present - has been an active agent in motivating, instigating or hindering cultural change, trying to speed it up or slow it down. Ranging from early modern drama to poetry of the First World War and from contemporary ecopoetry to migrant literature of the 1950s, they explore questions of literature and cultural change from theoretical and historical perspectives in literary and cultural studies.
This handbook of English Renaissance literature serves as a reference for both students and scholars, introducing recent debates and developments in early modern studies. Using new theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, the volume offers exemplary close readings of canonical and less well-known texts from all significant genres between c. 1480 and 1660. Its systematic chapters address questions about editing Renaissance texts, the role of translation, theatre and drama, life-writing, science, travel and migration, and women as writers, readers and patrons. The book will be of particular interest to those wishing to expand their knowledge of the early modern period beyond Shakespeare.
Mobility has recently become a keyword in discussions of literature and culture. Form world-historical processes like migration and the slave trade to local mobilities of travel, translation and transplantation, and finally to the narrative shaping of individual life trajectories in the bildungsroman, personal and social forms of mobility appear to provide a vital link between modes of experience and their cultural stylizations. different versions of `mobility´ form the basis for a renewed interest in the relationship between experiences of reality and cultural forms in the widest sense. What is examined in this volume is the value of mobility concepts for understanding literature and culture in interdisciplinary perspectives. Contributions explore experiences and representations of mobility between 1500 and 1900, especially in the following areas: travel, trade and tourism; genres and individual works of literature as products and media of mobility; cultural and transcultural patterns of mobility in relation to the forming of individual and collective identities; public and private, urban and rural spaces, physical vs. mental movements in space and time.
Mystik, verstanden als radikale individuelle Grenzerfahrung, ist zugleich ein Grenzfall kognitiver Bewältigung und kommunikativer Mitteilbarkeit. Das Vermittlungsproblem der mystischen Erfahrung und das Wissen um die damit verbundenen Paradoxien und Dissonanzen teilen die mittelalterlichen Mystiker mit modernen Neurowissenschaftlern, Physikern und Künstlern. Aus unterschiedlichen theoretischen, historischen und systematischen Blickrichtungen erkundet der vorliegende Band die Herausforderungen der Mystik an gegenwärtige Spektren der Kommunikations-, Bild- und Medienwissenschaft.