Bücher der Reihe Anglistische Forschungen

Margaret Cavendish entwirft Utopien weiblicher Herrschaft, die in einem Spannungsverhältnis zwischen weiblicher Selbstermächtigung und Bekräftigung der patriarchalischen Gesellschaftsideologie stehen. Ihre Ordnungsentwürfe und auch ihre Autorisierungsinstanzen weichen von männlich geprägten Diskursen des 17. Jahrhunderts an entscheidenden Stellen ab: Cavendish beruft sich zwar auf einen männlichen Gott, doch überlässt dieser die Herrschaft einer selbstständig waltenden weiblichen Naturfigur. Gleichzeitig hat Cavendish ein vitalistisch-materialistisches Naturverständnis, was die Hierarchie zwischen den Lebewesen, aber auch zwischen den Geschlechtern aufweicht. Diese Koexistenz und Konkurrenz unterschiedlicher Naturkonzepte und ihre Ausprägungen in Herrschaftsentwürfen wird in drei literarischen Hauptwerken Cavendishs untersucht: in den Prosaromanzen ,Blazing World' (1666) und ,Assaulted and Pursued Chastity' (1656) sowie im Drama ,The Convent of Pleasure' (1668).

The essays in this volume focus on new approaches to how literature reflects and creates 'world', and thus to the issues of "literature 'and' world" and "literature 'as' world". They discuss questions of the implied worldview of literary texts on the one hand, and the way literature may create 'world' through self-referentiality and the establishing of intermedial relations with other arts on the other. In the latter cases, works will foreground their own fictionality and/or mediality, and their status as artefacts and as the products of a poietic act of creation. Illustrating the potential of new approaches and developments for describing the nature of the worlds devised in fictional texts, the authors pay tribute to a scholar whose work has been foundational regarding the study of metareferentiality in literature and the arts, contemporary intermediality studies and the study of implied worldviews in literary texts: Werner Wolf.

'Not I - Kazuo Ishiguro and the Politics of Misrecognition' takes a closer look at how Ishiguro's narrators deal with their metaphorical 'parents', their literary ancestors from Hamlet to Alfred Prufrock. Ishiguro's narrators unwittingly express a metafictional concern about their existence in the shadows of English literary history and struggle with an imagined pressure to compete with iconic literary characters. This book traces their narrative anxiety against a variety of other canonical intertexts by William Shakespeare, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and T. S. Eliot and takes a closer look at the narrators' narrative strategy of repression. Like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, they all would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed through the carefully falsified construction of their stories. These narrators are never fully in control of their own narratives and so they inadvertently betray their own struggle for recognition.