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Wordplay involving several linguistic codes is an important modality of ludic language. This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the topic, discussing examples from different epochs, genres, and communicative situations. The contributions illustrate the multi-dimensionality, linguistic make-up, and the special interactive potential of wordplay across linguistic and cultural boundaries, including the challenging practice of translation.
Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death.In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine.It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.
This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.
As a well-known phenomenon in everyday communication, ambiguity has increasingly become the subject of interdisciplinary research in recent years. However, within this context, it has been observed that words or expressions situated within the artistic framework of storytelling have not yet been at the centre of research interest. This book aims to bridge this gap by examining the phenomenon of ambiguity from the perspective of narratology – understood as a general theory of narration and narrative communication. The volume pursues two goals: Firstly, it seeks to demonstrate that the interdisciplinary combination of linguistics, cultural history and narratology enriches the field of litera...
This volume focuses on realisations of wordplay in different cultures and social and historical contexts, and brings together various research traditions of approaching wordplay. Together with the volume DWP 7, it assembles selected papers presented at the interdisciplinary conference The Dynamics of Wordplay / La dynamique du jeu de mots (Trier, 2016) and stresses the inherent dynamicity of wordplay and wordplay research.
For more than fifty years, the proximity of Donne's work to Shakespeare's, including the range of their writings, has received scant attention. Centering on cross-fertilization between the writings of Shakespeare and Donne, the essays in this volume examine relationships that are broadly cultural, theoretical, and imaginative.
This book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity, as well as on their differences and similarities, both in synchrony and diachrony, and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts, which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective, with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Medieval Latin, and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad, encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines, including pragmatics, spoken discourse, conversation analysis, discourse genres (political, commercial, notarial discourse), corpus studies, language change, pragmaticalization, and language typology.
Although Frances Hodgson Burnett published numerous works for an adult readership, she is mainly remembered today for three novels written for children: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). This volume is dedicated to The Secret Garden. The articles address a wide range of issues, including the representation of the garden in Burnett's novel in the context of cultural history; the relationship between the concept of nature and female identity; the idea of therapeutic places; the notion of redemptive children in The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy; the concept of male identity; constructions of 'Otherness' and the redefinition of Englishness; film and anime versions of Burnett's classic; Noel Streatfeild's The Painted Garden as a rewriting of The Secret Garden; attitudes towards food in children's classics and Burnett's novel in the context of Edwardian girlhood fiction and the tradition of the female novel of development.
The most accessible approach yet to children's literature and narrative theory,Telling Children's Storiesis a comprehensive collection of never-before-published essays by an international slate of scholars that offers a broad yet in-depth assessment of narrative strategies unique to children's literature. The volume is divided into four interrelated sections: "Genre Templates and Transformations," "Approaches to the Picture Book," "Narrators and Implied Readers," and "Narrative Time." Mike Cadden's introduction considers the links between the various essays and topics, as well as their connections with such issues as metafiction, narrative ethics, focalization, and plotting. Ranging in focus...
Charlotte Brontë's final novel Villette (1853) is associated with ambiguity because of its open ending: Does M. Paul return to narrator-protagonist Lucy Snowe or is he killed in a storm raging on the Atlantic? Taking its famous ending as a starting point, this study explores Villette as a text in which ambiguity is all-pervasive in various ways. Among these is the narrator's ambivalent attitude toward herself and others, epitomised in her stylistic idiosyncrasies. The links between ambiguity and doubt are explored through an analysis of Lucy's signature phrase, "I know not," expressive of her existential doubts and questioning attitude toward the world. The analysis moreover focuses on the motif of the oracle as a traditionally ambiguous utterance, and explores its relevance in the context of the generic tradition of Villette as a fictional autobiography. Another focus is the interplay of figurative and literal levels of meaning in the allegorical episodes, creating ambiguity.