Bücher der Reihe Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature

Frequenting circuses in Paris and Berlin, Frank Wedekind, best known for "Spring Awakening" and the Lulu plays, learned that trapeze artists and tightrope walkers rely on different artificial reference points in space, in order to maintain their balance and orient themselves and to create their own sensorial and phenomenal worlds.

Considers rhetoric of burial reform, cemeterial customs, and epitaphic writing in Great Britain from mid-nineteenth century through Great War. This book studies mid- and late-Victorian responses to death and burial, including epitaph collections, and fictional representations of burial and epitaph writing, especially in novels of Charles Dickens.

Offers a major reassessment of the French Revolution's impact on the English novel of the Romantic period. This book focuses particularly - but by no means exclusively - on women writers of the time, it explores the enthusiasm, wariness, or hostility with which the Revolution was interpreted and represented for then-contemporary readers.

Beginning with Joyce and continuing with Woolf and Stein, Gender, Genre, and the Myth of human Singularity addresses the gender-genre law breaking that transcends the rigidity of either term-drama or fiction; it is the transgressive message itself that, ultimately, links these hybridic performances with modernism.

This study posits that ekphrasis and dream interpretation are similar due to both analyzing a visual image and attempting to translate the visual into the verbal in order to gain a better and more complete understanding of it.

Islands, both literal and figurative, recur in fiction authored by many prominent Canadian women writers. Using a critical lens based on Northrop Frye and Julia Kristeva, this book closely examines fourteen novels by eight twentieth-century authors, emphasizing works by L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Laurence, and Margaret Atwood. Several of the novels, such as Montgomery¿s Anne of Green Gables, Laurence¿s A Jest of God and The Diviners, Atwood¿s Surfacing and Bodily Harm, Alice Munro¿s The Lives of Girls and Women, and Gabrielle Roy¿s The Tin Flute, are among Canadäs most well-known. Some of the works discussed present the island as a redemptive retreat, but in most cases the island¿s role is ambiguous, ranging from a temporary respite from life¿s pressures to a nightmarish trap.

This interdisciplinary volume centers on the interrelations of storytelling and various manifestations of cultural identity, from written to oral and from autobiographical to regional and national. Indigenous storytelling, as well as storytelling for and by children and the elderly, are the main focus of these essays. Together, these fifteen texts make a significant contribution toward a deeper understanding of various aspects of textual and oral narrative: they broaden the lines of inquiry into multidisciplinary and multicultural interests, particularly those centering on the construction, expression, and contextualization of various types of identity; and they illustrate the deployment of storytelling not only as testimony, contestation, and subversion ¿ but also as peacebuilding. Many countries, languages and cultures are herein represented ¿ from the United States and Canada to Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, from English to Japanese to Greek to Italian to the languages of indigenous peoples of Latin America and the Philippines.

Domestic Biographies