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Literature and Fascination
Exploring literary fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction, this book illuminates the ways in which literary texts are designed, presented, and received. Detailed case studies include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan.
Richard III's Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity
The story of a medieval king's disability traveling through time from Shakespeare's hands to today
Infrastructures of Crisis in Global Twenty-First-Century Literature
Discourse about crisis is pervasive in the mass media and scholarship, and in discussions about the discipline of literary studies. Contemporary narratives about crisis concern systems and infrastructures on which societies rely. This book critically engages with crises as events of excess which surpass containment efforts by governments and institutions: as occurrences that generate conflicting discourses, meanings and political responses and as entangled with visible and underlying structures. Infrastructures of Crisis concentrates on the evocation of infrastructure in literary and filmic texts about real-world events, such as nuclear accidents, the 'refugee crisis', pandemics and climate change, and works across scholarly conversations to examine how a range of cataclysms is figured, as well as how cultural products dramatise infrastructures' entanglements with neoliberalism and colonialism.
The Cultural Life of Catastrophes and Crises
Catastrophes and crises are exceptions. They are disruptions of order. In various ways and to different degrees, they change and subvert what we regard as normal. They may occur on a personal level in the form of traumatic or stressful situations, on a social level in the form of unstable political, financial or religious situations, or on a global level in the form of environmental states of emergency. The main assumption in this book is that, in contrast to the directness of any given catastrophe and its obvious physical, economical and psychological consequences our understanding of catastrophes and crises is shaped by our cultural imagination. No matter in which eruptive and traumatizing...
The Supernatural Media Virus
Since the 1990s, the virus and the network metaphors have become increasingly popular, finding application in a broad range of everyday discourses, academic disciplines, and fiction genres. In this book, Rahel Sixta Schmitz defines and discusses a trope recurring in Gothic fiction: the supernatural media virus. This trope comprises the confluence of the virus, the network, and a deep, underlying media anxiety. This study shows how Gothic narratives such as House of Leaves or The Ring feature the supernatural media virus to negotiate as well as actively shape imaginations of the network society and the dangers of a globalized, technologized world.
Shakespeare and the Power of the Face
Throughout his plays, Shakespeare placed an extraordinary emphasis on the power of the face to reveal or conceal moral character and emotion, repeatedly inviting the audience to attend carefully to facial features and expressions. The essays collected here disclose that an attention to the power of the face in Shakespeare’s England helps explain moments when Shakespeare’s language of the self becomes intertwined with his language of the face. As the range of these essays demonstrates, an attention to Shakespeare’s treatment of faces has implications for our understanding of the historical and cultural context in which he wrote, as well as the significance of the face for the ongoing in...
Memory and Latency in Contemporary Anglophone Literature
Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable...
Turning Points
At times of crisis and revolution such as ours, diagnoses of crucial junctures and ruptures – ‘turning points’ – in the continuous flow of history are more prevalent than ever. Analysing literary, cinematic and other narratives, the volume seeks to understand the meanings conveyed by different concepts of turning points, the alternative concepts to which they are opposed when used to explain historical change, and those contexts in which they are unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions. Literature and film in particular stress the importance of turning points as a sensemaking device (as part of a character’s or a community’s cultural memory), while at the same time unfolding the constructive and hence relative character of turning points. Offering complex reflections on the notion of turning points, literary and filmic narratives are thus of particular interest to the present volume.
Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy
This book deals with the poetics of the human face, the art of physiognomy, and strategies of nonverbal communication in Shakespeare's plays. It offers new insight into Shakespeare's modes of characterisation, and his art of performance. In Shakespeare's plays, the human face is a focal point. As an area where expression and impression meet (and, ideally, correspond), its reliability and trustworthiness are frequently put to the test, sparking off a controversy which serves as a significant and highly challenging subtext to the overall plot. Professor Baumbach studied at Heidelberg, Cambridge and Munich, and has taught at the universities of Warwick, Giessen, and Stanford. She is now at the University of Innsbruck. Her publications include "'Let me behold thy face'-- Physiognomik und Gesichtslektueren in Shakespeares Tragoedien" (2007), "An Introduction to the Study of Plays and Drama" (as co-author, 2009), and "Literature and Fascination" (2015.
