'Retro' is not only a pervading phenomenon in today's Western culture but has informed cultural history for some centuries and thus gives momentousness to the subject of the present volume, namely literary texts and musical compositions which, for various reasons and with multiple functions, 'make it old'.

This volume focusses on a rarely discussed method of meaning production, namely via the absence, rather than presence, of signifiers. It does so from an interdisciplinary, transmedial perspective, which covers systematic, media-comparative and historical aspects, and reveals various forms and functions of missing signifiers across arts and media. The meaningful silences, blanks, lacunae, pauses, etc., treated by the ten contributors are taken from language and literature, film, comics, opera and instrumental music, architecture, and the visual arts. Contributors are: Nassim Balestrini, Walter Bernhart, Olga Fischer, Saskia Jaszoltowski, Henry Keazor, Peter Revers, Klaus Rieser, Daniel Stein, Anselm Wagner, Werner Wolf

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, providing a widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity.

One possible description of the contemporary medial landscape in Western culture is that it has gone 'meta' to an unprecedented extent, so that a remarkable 'meta-culture' has emerged. Indeed, 'metareference', i.e. self-reflexive comments on, or references to, various kinds of media-related aspects of a given medial artefact or performance, specific media and arts or the media in general is omnipresent and can, nowadays, be encountered in 'high' art and literature as frequently as in their popular counterparts, in the "traditional "media as well as in new media. From the "Simpsons," pop music, children's literature, computer games and pornography to the contemporary visual arts, feature film, postmodern fiction, drama and even architecture - everywhere one can find metareferential explorations, comments on or criticism of representation, medial conventions or modes of production and reception, and related issues. Within individual media and genres, notably in research on postmodernist metafiction, this outspoken tendency towards 'metaization' is known well enough, and various reasons have been given for it. Yet never has there been an attempt to account for what one may aptly term the current 'metareferential turn' on a larger, transmedial scale. This is what "The Metareferential Turn in Contemporary Arts and Media: Forms, Functions, Attempts at Explanation" undertakes to do as a sequel to its predecessor, the volume "Metareference across Media" (vol. 4 in the series 'Studies in Intermediality'), which was dedicated to theoretical issues and transhistorical case studies. Coming from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds, the contributors to the present volume propose explanations of impressive subtlety, breadth and depth for the current situation in addition to exploring individual forms and functions of metareference which may be linked with particular explanations. As expected, there is no monocausal reason to be found for the situation under scrutiny, yet the proposals made have in their compination a remarkable explanatory power which contributes to a better understanding of an important facet of current media production and reception. The essays assembled in the volume, which also contains an introduction with a detailed survey over the possibilities of accounting for the metareferential turn, will be relevant to students and scholars from a wide variety of fields: cultural history at large, intermediality and media studies as well as, more particularly, literary studies, music, film and art history.

The notion of aesthetic illusion relates to a number of art forms and media. Defined as a pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of texts and artefacts, it amounts to the reader's or viewer's sense of having entered the represented world while at the same time keeping a distance from it. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts is an in-depth study of the main questions surrounding this experience of art as reality. Beginning with an introduction providing historical background to modern discussions of illusion, it deals with a wide range of theoretical issues. The collection explores the nature and function of the aesthetic illusion as well as the role of affect and emotion, the implications of aesthetic illusion for the theory of fiction, the variable forms of aesthetic illusion and its relationship to other components of aesthetic response. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts brings together a team of scholars from philosophy, literature and art and presents an interdisciplinary examination of a concept lying at the heart of contemporary aesthetics.

This volume is a pioneering study in the theory and history of the imitation of music in fiction and constitutes an important contribution to current intermediality research. Starting with a comparison of basic similarities and differences between literature and music, the study goes on to provide outlines of a general theory of intermediality and its fundamental forms, in which a more specialized theory of the musicalization of (narrative) literature based on contemporary narratology and a typology of the forms of musico-literary intermediality are embedded. It also addresses the question of how to recognize a musicalized fiction when reading one and why Sterne's Tristram Shandy, contrary to what has been previously said, is not to be regarded as a musicalized fiction. In its historical part, the study explores forms and functions of experiments with the musicalization of fiction in English literature. After a survey of the major preconditions for musicalization - the increasing appreciation of music in 18th and 19th-century aesthetics and its main causes - exemplary fictional texts from romanticism to postmodernism are analyzed. Authors interpreted are De Quincey, Joyce, Woolf, A. Huxley, Beckett, Burgess and Josipovici. Whilst the limitations of a transposition of music into fiction remain apparent, experiments in this field yield valuable insights into mainly a-mimetic and formalist aesthetic tendencies in the development of more recent fiction as a whole and also show to what extent traditional conceptions of music continue to influence the use of this medium in literature. The volume is of relevance for students and scholars of English, comparative and general literature as well as for readers who take an interest in intermediality or interart research.

The notion of aesthetic illusion relates to a number of art forms and media. Defined as a pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of texts and artefacts, it amounts to the reader's or viewer's sense of having entered the represented world while at the same time keeping a distance from it. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts is an in-depth study of the main questions surrounding this experience of art as reality. Beginning with an introduction providing historical background to modern discussions of illusion, it deals with a wide range of theoretical issues. The collection explores the nature and function of the aesthetic illusion as well as the role of affect and emotion, the implications of aesthetic illusion for the theory of fiction, the variable forms of aesthetic illusion and its relationship to other components of aesthetic response. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts brings together a team of scholars from philosophy, literature and art and presents an interdisciplinary examination of a concept lying at the heart of contemporary aesthetics.