Literature and Crises

Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-3-86821-741-4
Verlag: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Buch, Englisch, Band 73, 298 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 225 mm, Gewicht: 547 g

Reihe: Studies in English Literary and Cultural History (ELCH) /Studien zur Englischen Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft (ELK)

This volume on the interfaces of the concepts ‘literature’ and ‘crises’ presents analyses of how literary works articulate, negotiate, and challenge states and notions of crisis. It offers theorizations and exemplary analyses of both historical and contemporary relationships between literature and crises – including economic, environmental, political, social, cultural, and humanitarian crises as well as crises of identity, norms, values, and literary expression itself. A driving thesis is that literary and other cultural negotiations of crises can open up alternative ways of thinking and doing, supplying us with narratives and aesthetic experiences that do not simply reflect but also reframe our conceptions and enactments of crisis. By presenting case studies of works ranging from the 17th-century history play to social-media life writing of the 21st century, the volume conveys a sense of how literature offers diverse and nuanced perspectives on various cultures in/of crisis that often challenge those promulgated by, for instance, the mainstream media. Literary discourse can provide frameworks in which both past and current ‘ages of crises’ must not only be conceived of as periods of fear, danger, and anxiety but also as moments that contain the productive potential to disrupt and transform hegemonic discourses and assumptions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kovach, Elizabeth

Nünning, Ansgar

Polland, Imke

Inhaltsverzeichnis

CONTENTS ELIZABETH KOVACH, ANSGAR NÜNNING, IMKE POLLAND Where Literature and Crises Meet: Coming to Terms with Two Complex Concepts and Their Interfaces        1 I. EARLY MODERN HISTORICAL CRISES AND CRISES OF GENRE ANGELA LOCATELLI Experiencing and Responding to Crisis: Layered Discourses and Hybrid Epistemologies in Early Modern English Culture        31 ELISABETH WÅGHÄLL NIVRE Early Modern Travel Accounts and the Male Body: Exploring the Aesthetics of Human Crisis        45 EMANUEL STELZER The Crisis in/of the History Play in Early Stuart England: Strange Subjections in John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1634)        59 II. CRISES OF LANGUAGE AND REPRESENTATION IN 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE FREDERIK TYGSTRUP Moments of Crisis in Post-War European Literature        75 LAURA OULANNE The Feeling of Show and Tell: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) and the Crisis of Representation in Modernist Literature        91 VERENA LINDEMANN Rereading Alves Redol’s O Cavalo Espantado (1960): Literary Negotiations of a Refugee Crisis and the Remembrance of Jewish Refugees in Lisbon        105 SANJA NIVESJÖ Queering Form and Content: A Crisis of Whiteness in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974) and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1977)        117 ALEXANDRA EFFE Fighting Real Fires with Fictional Flames: J. M. Coetzee’s Literary Response to Political and Discursive Crises        131 III. LITERARY NARRATIONS OF MINDS IN CRISIS ROBERT A. WINKLER Requiem : Hermann Burger’s Brenner (1989) and the Crisis of Performing Life (and Suicide) in Autobiographical Writing        145 ANNA OVASKA Minds in Crises: Literary Representations of Psychotic Experiences        159 SUSANNE CHRIST Dementia: ‘Crisis’? ‘Seasickness’? – J. Bernlef’s Novel Out of Mind (1989) as a Corrective to Medial Representations of Dementia        175 IV. NEGOTIATIONS OF 21ST-CENTURY ISSUES & CRISES IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURES PETER HANENBERG The Ultimate Crisis: Narrating and Translating Europe        191 IMKE POLLAND “A Golden Age of Monarchy?” Staging Hypothetical Crises in Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III (2014)        203 STELLA LANGE Cinematic Narratives of Crises in the Film Musical Across the Universe (2007)        221 SNEŽANA VULETIC The Novel as a ‘Crisis Manager’ in Contemporary Nigerian Culture: The Case of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)        239 SABINE SCHÖNFELLNER Do Posthumans Dream of Becoming Animals? Literary Negotiations of the Human Being in Crisis in 21st-Century Fiction        251 SARA ERIKSSON Social Media Life Writing and the Crisis of the Public Sphere: Mira Gonzalez and the Trope of Oversharing        263 ANDRESSA SCHRÖDER Exploring Beyond the Representations of the Environmental Crisis: (Per-)Formative and Affective Conditions of the Environmental-Self        275