Tiffany Stern, ed. Rethinking Theatrical Documents in Shakespeare’s England. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020.

in Shakespeare Jahrbuch (2021), 157

Telling Tales of Empire in Contemporary British Popular Culture

in Habermann, Ina; Krug, Christian (Eds.) And Hereby Hangs a Tale: A Critical Anatomy of (Popular) Tales (2020)

Dickens as an Agent of Change

Book published by Cornell University Press - 2nd ed. (2019)

Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy ... [more ▼]

Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable's protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholars—Malcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracy—suggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian. [less ▲]

Englands dramatische Geschichte: Shakespeares Histories

in Singh, Sikander; Leber, Manfred (Eds.) Literatur und Geschichte (2018)

Early Modern Spectacles

in Journal for the Study of British Cultures (2018), 25(2), 127

Dickens as an Agent of Change

Book published by AMS Press - 1 ed. (2015)

‘Eminent Victorians’ and Neo-Victorian Fictional Biography.

in Böhm-Schnitker, Nadine; Gruss, Susanne (Eds.) Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (2014)

Taking her cue from the contemporary interest in both life-writing and Victorian individuals, Steveker focuses on the genre of neo-Victorian fictional biography. Providing close readings of Adam Foulds’s ... [more ▼]

Taking her cue from the contemporary interest in both life-writing and Victorian individuals, Steveker focuses on the genre of neo-Victorian fictional biography. Providing close readings of Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009) and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2009), Steveker argues that these two novels not only undermine clichéd perceptions of the ‘eminent Victorians’ whose lives they depict, but also question the idealised image of the Victorian age as a period of confident humanism and individual self-respect. Making two Victorian authors return as neo-Victorian fictional characters, Foulds’s and Flanagan’s novels exemplify the desire of repetition which is symptomatic of the neo-Victorian project. [less ▲]

Precarious Selves in Contemporary British War Novels

in Korte, Barbara; Régard, Frédéric (Eds.) Narrating 'Precariousness': Modes, Media, Ethics (2014)

This essay takes its cue from Butler's notion of precariousness, delineated in her study Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). But while Butler is concerned with the events of 9/11 ... [more ▼]

This essay takes its cue from Butler's notion of precariousness, delineated in her study Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). But while Butler is concerned with the events of 9/11 as the US-American seminal catastrophe of the early twenty-first century, this essay focuses on fictional representations of WWI and WWII, the two wars which turned out to determine European and, indeed, World politics throughout the twentieth century. The novels discussed in this essay are examples of how fictional texts of both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries are involved in critically (re)evaluating the British perspective on these two wars which can be described, each for its own particular cultural, political and ideological reasons, as having exposed the precariousness of human existence. Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995) is engaged in demythologizing WWI as a 'great' war. A.L. Kennedy’s Day (2007) is concerned with undermining the notion of WWII as a 'just' war the British fought in defence of civilization and humanity. Each novel problematizes the damaging effects which the inhumane conditions of industrial warfare have on human psychic stability. Both Barker's trilogy and Kennedy's novel feature protagonists whose traumatic war experiences have caused them to develop split personalities; and it is with the help of these characters' mental instabilities that the texts negotiate the precarious consequences entailed in a self's complete loss of control and power over one's own well-being. Next to discussing each author's particular representational strategy of narrating her protagonist's split into self and internal other, the essay also analyses the different ideological agendas underlying Barker's and Kennedy's texts. As the essay shows, both writers' protagonists strive to reconcile self and internal other in order to reaffirm their identities. But while Kennedy's Day is indebted to liberal humanism in its celebration of 'high' art and its supposed unifying effects on human Selfhood, Barker's novels suggest a reconciliation of traumatized self and internal other which is best analysed through the lens of Levinasian ethics. The Regeneration trilogy, the essay argues, privileges a concept of dual, if not multiple selfhood by representing healing as the ethical acceptance of difference, not its repression or expulsion. Thus, Barker's novels defy the violence which, according to Levinas, comes from subjecting the other to the self's understanding. [less ▲]

Neue Welten neu entdeckt: Shakespeares Tempest

in Bogner, Ralph; Leber, Manfred (Eds.) Klassiker Neu-Lektüren (2013)

‘My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have’: A.S. Byatt's Female Artists.

in Pankratz, Anette; Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara (Eds.) Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction after 1945 (2012)