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Comfort is a prominent and highly loaded concept, as popular discourses on cosy environments, safe spaces, but also the importance of ›getting out of your comfort zone‹ attest. This volume is the first to investigate ›comfort‹ as a cultural narrative and emotional touchstone in contemporary culture. Taken together, the contributions to the volume offer an overview of different approaches to and conceptualisations of comfort in linguistics, in literary, media, and cultural studies, and art history. They showcase how ›comfort‹ serves as a valuable lens to analyse contemporary artworks and developments, e.g. live theatre broadcasting or political interventions in the US-American media sphere.
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...
Preliminary Material -- The Concern for Self-Possession -- Self-Narration: Conditions, Representations, and Consequences -- The Female Self in Rhys and the Category of the Amateur -- Positioning Rhys's Heroines within Colonial Relations -- Narrative Responses to 'Exile From the English Family': The Zombie and the Mad Witch -- White Female Colonial Self-Articulation: Narrative of Displacement in Voyage in the Dark -- Colonial Creatures: The Community of Life-Stories in Good Morning, Midnight -- Quartet: The Making of the Amateur and Third-Person Self-Narration -- Intersubjectivity and Self-Arrangements in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie -- Membership in the Holy English Family and Mad-Witch Narration in Wide Sargasso Sea -- Conclusion: Self-Narratives for the Chorus Girl and the Horrid Colonial -- Works Cited -- Index.
Witness is an anthology comprising 40 critical essays from an international cast of researchers who engage with a complex set of questions concerning notions of witnessing and attestation in 20th- and 21st-century Western culture. The contributors provide insightful perspectives on the subject of witnessing and suggest how this vital yet relatively unexplored concept lends itself to a wide range of media and subject areas. The essays critically reconsider existing scholarly tendencies which focus on historical evidence and the witness' vocalization of true remembrance. They do this by establishing important links with canonical texts, images, and voices within a theoretical and interpretive framework where questions of mediation, memorization, and representation are addressed.
The conviction that the development and promotion of the arts, humanities and culture through the study of literature and the aesthetic are the fundamental constituents of any progress in society is at the heart of this volume. The essays gathered here explore the role of the imagination and aesthetic awareness in an age when the corporatization of knowledge is in the process of transforming literary studies, and political commitment is in danger of disappearing behind a supposedly post-ideological late-capitalist consensus. The main focus of the volume is the mutual implication of aesthetics and ideology and the status and value of different types of art within the political arena. Challeng...
Building on the notion of fiction as communicative act, this collection brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to examine the evolving relationship between authors and readers in fictional works from 18th-century English novels through to contemporary digital fiction. The book showcases a diverse range of contributions from scholars in stylistics, rhetoric, pragmatics, and literary studies to offer new ways of looking at the "author–reader channel," drawing on work from Roger Sell, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, and James Phelan. The volume traces the evolution of its form across historical periods, genres, and media, from its origins in the conversational mode of direct address in...
Fear in its many facets appears to constitute an intriguing and compelling subject matter for writers and screenwriters alike. The contributions address fictional representations and explorations of fear in different genres and different periods of literary and cultural history. The topics include representations of political violence and political fear in English Renaissance culture and literature; dramatic representations of fear and anxiety in English Romanticism; the dramatic monologue as an expression of fears in Victorian society; cultural constructions of fear and empathy in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself (2003); facets of children's fears in twentieth- and twenty-first-century stream-of-consciousness fiction; the representation of fear in war movies; the cultural function of horror film remakes; the expulsion of fear in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and fear and nostalgia in Mohsin Hamid's post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for repres...
The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. The collection brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism.
This volume explores how and by whom early modern Dutch Bibles were used. Through a detailed analysis of paratextual features and readers’ traces in over 180 surviving Bible copies, Renske Hoff shows how individuals manifested their faith in owning, reading, and personalising the Bible, in a period characterised by religious turmoil. From nuns and countesses to tailors and merchants: Bibles were read by a diverse public. Printer-publishers shaped the contents and paratextual features of their Bible editions to suit the varied wishes of the reading public. Readers themselves added marginalia, corrected the text, or pasted texts and images in their books, displaying their creativity as users as well as stressing the malleability of the material Bible.