How can narrative theory account for the changing roles of storytelling and storysharing in the public sphere? This essay proposes a new concept of narrative dynamics, one that generates well-constrained descriptions of specific elements, features, or qualities of narratives, as well as programmatic claims concerning their potential uses and effects. Narrative dynamics research is equally inter…
This volume is a study in the Romantic reshaping of space and time to evoke the fantastic interior landscape and the temporal dynamics of subjective experience. Close textual analysis is coupled with frequent reference to literary and intellectual history in the reassessment of the narrative art of Novalis and Tieck. The author examines Novalis' "Hyazinth und Rosenblüte", "Atlantis", "Arion" a…
"Vertical Readings in Danteâ s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that be…
This book considers the evolution and characteristics of Nigeria’s third-generation literature, which emerged between the late 1980s and the early 1990s and is marked by expressive modes and concerns distinctly different from those of the preceding era. The creative writing of this period reflects new sensibilities and anxieties about Nigeria’s changing fortunes in the post-colonial era. Th…
Fugitive Borders explores a new archive of 19th-century autobiographical writing by black authors in North America. For that purpose, Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly enslaved men in the 1850s that emerged in or around the historical region of Canada West (now known as Ontario) and that defy the genre conventions of the classic slave narrative. Instead, these te…
Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice…
In this study the extent to which Wieland contributed to the literary genre of the travesty is established, the poet's approach to his sources as well as the nature and duality of his innovations are investigated, and the level and distribution of his travesties in relationship to the sum total of his literary work in general is appraised.
In this volume, John Farrell shows that political utopias—societies with laws and customs designed to short-circuit the foibles of human nature for the benefit of our collective existence—have a perennial opponent, the honor-based culture of aristocracy that dominated most of the world from ancient times into early modernity and whose status-based competitive psychology persists to the pres…
Recently, literary critics and some historians have argued that to use the language of separate spheres is to "mistake fiction for reality." However, the tendency in this criticism is to ignore the work of feminist political theorists who argue that a range of ideologies of the public and private consistently work to mask gender inequalities. In Keeping Up Her Geography, Tanya Ann Kenedy argues…
These seven essays by the most recent English translator of The Tale of Genji emphasize three major interpretive issues. What is the place of the hero (Hikaru Genji) in the work? What story gives the narrative underlying continuity and form? And how does the closing section of the tale (especially the ten “Uji chapters”) relate to what precedes it? Written over a period of nine years, the e…