Aus Anlass ihrer Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen erscheint der erste Sammelband uber das Werk der Lyrikerin, Essayistin und UEbersetzerin Monika Rinck. Die Aufsatze decken ein methodisch und thematisch breites Feld ab: von Close Readings bis zu subjekttheoretischen Fragestellungen, von Barockbezugen bis zur Analyse der Selbstpositionierung der Autorin im Feld der Gegenwartsliteraturen. Insbesondere geraten dabei die fur die Autorin charakteristischen Grenzuberschreitungen zwischen Lyrik und Essay, zwischen poetischer Praxis und Lebensform in den Blick. Den Band rundet ein Gesprach mit der Autorin ab.

In Melville's Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, Damien B. Schlarb explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Schlarb argues that attending to Melville's engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical skepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace modern analytical techniques, such as higher biblical criticism. In the medium of literature, he articulates a new way of accessing the Bible by marrying the moral and spiritual didacticism of its language with the intellectual distance afforded by critical reflection, a hallmark of modern intellectual style. Melville's Wisdom joins other works of post secular literary studies in challenging its own discipline's constitutive secularization narrative by rethinking modern, putatively secular cultural formations in terms of their reciprocity with religious concepts and texts. Schlarb foregrounds Melville's sustained, career-spanning concern with biblical wisdom, its formal properties, and its knowledge-creating potential. By excavating this project from his oeuvre, Melville's Wisdom shows how Melville celebrates intellectually rigorous, critical inquisitiveness, an attitude that we often associate with modernity but which Melville saw augured by the wisdom books. He finds in this attitude the means for avoiding the spiritually corrosive effects of skepticism.

The book presents a theory of relationships between the forms of devotion and early drama genres. The historical background is the circumstances of the Church becoming independent of the Empire. A theological and philosophical aspect of the transformation of piety at the time was the specification of the ontological status of the sacred (spiritualization) and "shifting it to Heaven" (transcendentalization). In opposition to a theory of Western civilization as a process of increasing individual self-control, the author argues for the need to take into account purely religious conditions (the idea of recapitulation). This allows the author to develop a holistic aesthetics for the religiously inspired creativity in the period spanning the 11th-15th centuries and to propose a new typology of medieval drama.

This book engages in an interdisciplinary study of the establishment and entrenchment of gender roles in early modern England. Drawing upon the methods and sources of literary criticism and social history, this edited volume shows how politics at both the elite and plebeian levels of society involved violence that either resulted from or expressed hostility toward the early modern gender system. Contributors take fresh approaches to prominent works by Shakespeare, Middleton, and Behn as well as discuss lesser known texts and events such as the execution of female heretics in Reformation Norwich and the punishment of prostitutes in seventeenth-century London to draw new conclusions about gender in early modern England.

Humour has been discovered in every known human culture and thinkers have discussed it for over two thousand years. Humour can serve many functions; it can be used to relieve stress, to promote goodwill among strangers, to dissipate tension within a fractious group, to display intelligence, and some have even claimed that it improves health and fights sickness. In this Very Short Introduction Noel Carroll examines the leading theories of humour including The Superiority Theory and The Incongruity Theory. He considers the relation of humour to emotion and cognition, and explores the value of humour, specifically in its social functions. He argues that humour, and the comic amusement that follows it, has a crucial role to play in the construction of communities, but he also demonstrates that the social aspect of humour raises questions such as 'When is humour immoral?' and 'Is laughing at immoral humour itself immoral?'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In der Studie werden die Marchenerzahlungen der Bruder Grimm konsequent als Literatur aus Literatur in den Blick genommen. UEber die Entstehungs- und Transformationsgeschichte wird transparent gemacht, wie im Zuge der Redaktion durch die Bruder Grimm, im Wesentlichen durch Wilhelm Grimm, literarische Vorlagen umdeklariert und zu den bekannten Marchenerzahlungen umgeformt wurden. Anhand einer Reihe von Modelluntersuchungen - u.a. von Rapunzel, Jorinde und Joringel und Der Jude im Dorn - wird aufgezeigt, dass die Marchenerzahlungen der Bruder Grimm entgegen ihrer traditionellen Einschatzung als 'Volksmarchen' literarischen Ursprungs sind und selbst literarischen Charakter besitzen.

Der literaturdidaktische Diskurs ist von unterschiedlichen Annahmen uber Starken und Schwachen verschiedener Gesprachstypen bestimmt, systematisch empirisch erforscht sind diese bislang allerdings nicht. Diesem Forschungsdesiderat widmet sich das Forschungsprojekt "AEsthetische Kommunikation im Literaturunterricht" (AESKIL), in dem diese Untersuchung zu verorten ist. Auf Basis der Theorie der asthetischen Erfahrung und der 'Literary Literacy' wurde ein operationalisierbares Modell 'AEsthetische Kommunikation im Literaturunterricht' entwickelt, das die Zusammenhange zweier Grundtypen literarischer Gesprache und der durch sie initiierten spezifischen Affordanzen mit literarasthetischen Verstehens- und Erfahrungsprozessen heuristisch abbildet und das in einer videographiegestutzten Vergleichsstudie mit Treatment- und Kontrollgruppen (N = 699 Schuler*innen in 34 Gymnasialklassen der 10. Jahrgangsstufe) mit quantitativen und qualitativen Methoden empirisch untersucht worden ist.

Erma J. Fisk, world-travelling ornithologist and bird-bander, shares the wealth of her years of travel in this delightful collection of food, people and experiences that will charm even those who don't know a robin from a radish.

Heinrich von Kleists politische Texte aus den Jahren 1808/1809 werden in der Forschung oft als Ausdruck des bedenklichen Nationalismus gelesen, der an den rassistischen Chauvinismus angrenze. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht dieses kontrovers diskutierte Problem aus der staatsrechtlichen Perspektive und zeigt, dass es hier um eine implizite politische Theorie des Dichters geht, die mit dem auf die roemische Antike zuruckreichenden verfassungsrechtlichen Begriff des Ausnahmezustandes untrennbar verknupft ist. Mit der Krisensituation in Zusammenhang gebracht, treten der Staat und die Nation bei Kleist als instabile und dynamische Existenzen auf und gerade in diesem Punkt kann man eine Radikalisierung des Konzeptes der Volkssouveranitat feststellen, mit dem die franzoesischen Revolutionare und Rousseau ihren Republikanismus begrunden; das also mit dem Rassismus nichts zu tun hat.

This book traces affinities between digital and medieval media, exploring how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about increasing literacy, audiences' agency, literary culture and media formats from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from well-known poems of Chaucer and Lydgate to wall texts, banqueting poems and devotional works written by and for women, Participatory reading argues that making readers work offered writers ways to shape their reputations and the futures of their productions. At the same time, the interactive reading practices they promoted enabled audiences to contribute to - and contest - writers' burgeoning authority, making books and reading work for everyone. -- .

This book shows how African American literature emerged as a world-recognized literature: less as the product of a seamless tradition of writers signifying upon their ancestors and more the product of three generations of ambitious, competitive individuals aiming to be the first great African American writer. It charts a canon of fictional landmarks, beginning with The House Behind the Cedars and culminating in the National Book Award-Winner Invisible Man, and tells the compelling stories of the careers of key African American writers, including Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. These writers worked within the white-dominated, commercial, Eurocentric literary field to put African American literature on the world literary map, while struggling to transcend the cultural expectations attached to their position as 'Negro authors'. Literary Ambition and the African American Novel tells as much about the novels that these writers could not publish as it does about their major achievements.

Das vorliegende Buch zielt auf eine theologische Sensibilisierung fur explizit nicht religioes qualifizierte Literaturformen. Durch eine interdisziplinare und kulturhermeneutische Konzeption wird ein Beitrag fur die Praktische Theologie, den aktuellen literaturtheologischen Forschungsdiskurs sowie fur die Gestaltung von Kirche und Predigt sichergestellt. Im Rahmen einer exemplarischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem kriminalliterarischen Werk des Schriftstellers Heinrich Steinfest wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob sich innerhalb eines literarischen Werks eine sogenannte unsichtbare Theologie ausmachen lasst, die sich als die Artikulation und Reflexion einer unsichtbaren Religion verstehen lasst und somit ein neues Licht auf die Frage nach der Umformung des christlichen Denkens in der Neuzeit wirft.

Revised to reflect critical trends of the past 15 years, the third iteration of this widely adopted critical edition presents the 1831 text of Mary Shelley's English Romantic novel along with critical essays that introduce students to Frankenstein from contemporary psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, gender/queer, postcolonial, and cultural studies perspectives. The text and essays are complemented by contextual documents, introductions (with bibliographies), and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms. In the third edition, three of the six essays are new, representing recent gender/queer, postcolonial, and cultural theories. The contextual documents have been significantly revised to include many images of Frankenstein from contemporary popular culture.

"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism." So begins one of history's most important documents, a work of such magnitude that it has forever changed not only the scope of world politics, but indeed the course of human civilization. The Communist Manifesto was written in Friedrich Engels's clear, striking prose and declared the earth-shaking ideas of Karl Marx. Upon publication in 1848, it quickly became the credo of the poor and oppressed who longed for a society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
The Communist Manifesto contains the seeds of Marx's more comprehensive philosophy, which continues to inspire influential economic, political, social, and literary theories. But the Manifesto is most valuable as an historical document, one that led to the greatest political upheaveals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the establishment of the Communist governments that until recently ruled half the globe.
This Bantam Classic edition of The Communist Manifesto includes Marx and Engels's historic 1872 and 1882 prefaces, and Engels's notes and prefaces to the 1883 and 1888 editions.

Unter dem Schlagwort eines ,Neuen Kosmopolitismus' pladieren Theoretiker*innen verschiedener Disziplinen seit Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts fur eine kritische Wiederaufnahme und Aktualisierung des Kosmopolitismusbegriffs. Obwohl in diesem Kontext wiederholt die wesentliche Bedeutung betont wurde, die dem Exil in Bezug auf die Ausbildung kosmopolitischer Praktiken und Haltungen zukommt, sind die im deutschsprachigen Exil der Jahre 1933 bis 1945 entstandenen Texte bisher noch nicht umfassender in Beziehung zu neokosmopolitischen Positionen gesetzt worden. Hier setzt die Studie mit einer Relekture von Werken von Irmgard Keun, Joseph Roth, Peter Weiss, Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger und Thomas Mann an. Daruber hinaus bearbeitet sie mit ihrer Konzentration auf den Bereich der Exilliteratur auch insofern ein innovatives Forschungsfeld, als dezidiert literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven in den Debatten eines ,Neuen Kosmopolitismus' bisher stark unterreprasentiert sind.

The cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book the acclaimed philosopher Jacques Ranciere relates cinema to literature and theatre. With literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing its images and its philosophy; and it rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre's dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one feels moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus for Ranciere, the cinema is the always disappointed dream of a language of images.

This book evaluates twentieth century British and Global Anglophone literature in relation to the growth of ecological thinking in the United Kingdom. Restless modernists such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys developed a literary aesthetic of slowness and immediacy to critique the exhausting and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and industrial life. At the same time, environmental groups such as the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves and the Smoke Abatement League moved from economic registers of 'value' and 'trust' to more cultural terms of 'recovery' and 'regeneration' to position nature as a healing force in the postwar era. Through a variety of literary, scientific, and political texts, an environmental movement emerged alongside the fast, fragmented, and traumatic aspects of modernization in order to sustain place and community in terms of lateral influence and ecological dependence.

From literary studies to digital humanities, Introducing English Studies is a complete introduction to the many fields and sub-disciplines of English studies for majors starting out in the subject for the first time. The book covers topics including: * history of English language and linguistics * literature and literary criticism * cinema and new media Studies * composition and rhetoric * creative and professional writing * critical theory * digital humanities The book is organized around the central questions of the field and includes case studies demonstrating how assignments might be approached, as well as annotated guides to further reading to support more in-depth study. A glossary of key critical terms helps readers locate essential definitions quickly when studying and writing and revising essays. A supporting companion website also offers sample assignments and activities, examples of student writing, career guidance and weblinks.

Today many people take reading for granted, but we remain some way off from attaining literacy for the global human population. And whilst we think we know what reading is, it remains in many ways a mysterious process, or set of processes. The effects of reading are myriad: it can be informative, distracting, moving, erotically arousing, politically motivating, spiritual, and much, much more. At different times and in different places reading means different things. In this Very Short Introduction Belinda Jack explores the fascinating history of literacy, and the opportunities reading opens. For much of human history reading was the preserve of the elite, and most reading meant being read to. Innovations in printing, paper-making, and transport, combined with the rise of public education from the late eighteenth century on, brought a dramatic rise in literacy in many parts of the world. Established links between a nation's levels of literacy and its economy led to the promotion of reading for political ends. But, equally, reading has been associated with subversive ideas, leading to censorship through multiple channels: denying access to education, controlling publishing, destroying libraries, and even the burning of authors and their works. Indeed, the works of Voltaire were so often burned that an enterprising Parisian publisher produced a fire-proof edition, decorated with a phoenix. But, as Jack demonstrates, reading is a collaborative act between an author and a reader, and one which can never be wholly controlled. Telling the story of reading, from the ancient world to digital reading and restrictions today, Belinda Jack explores why it is such an important aspect of our society. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Marlene Streeruwitz ist eine der streitbarsten politischen Autor*innen der Gegenwart. Literatur ist ihr nicht nur politisches Instrument, sondern als "Modell der Welt in Sprache" zugleich auch asthetisch autonom. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes diskutieren die Weiterschreibungen, Gegen- und Neukonstruktionen der aussertextuellen Welt in den Prosatexten, Essays, Vorlesungen und crossmedialen Projekten der Autorin. In den Blick genommen wird das Welt- und Lebenswissen der Literatur, ihr Beitrag zu unserer Trauer und Resistenz, Erinnerungs- und UEberlebensfahigkeit - zwischen Gluck, Lust, Liebe, (Fur )Sorge und Schmerz. Marlene Streeruwitz tragt - neben einem Gesprach mit den beiden Herausgeberinnen - einen Originalbeitrag sowie einen bisher ungedruckten poetologischen Essay zum Band bei.