Camp Comforts investigates the wide-ranging impact of camp on AIDS literature and places this impact within two different traditions of camp analysis: a politically subversive one that aims at social change and an aesthetically uplifting one that aims at personal healing. Christian Lassen argues that camp may in fact serve both ends, social change and personal healing, and goes on to explore reparative reading practices in order to rehabilitate alleviation and relief as vital objectives in literary representations of gay grief. In this way, Camp Comforts reveals the workings that make camp so...

Using the theoretical frameworks of Freud, Todorov, and Bahktin, this book explores how American writers of the late 20th century have translated the psychoanalytical concept of "the uncanny" into their novelistic discourses. The two texts under scrutiny - Paul Auster's City of Glass and Toni Morrison's Jazz - show that the uncanny has developed into a crucial trope to delineate personal and collective fears that are often grounded on the postmodern disruption of spatio-temporal continuities and coherences.

Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the "wounded mind." This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psychiatry. It then carries that dialogue forward to postmodern fiction, examining further how empirical approaches can deepen our theorizations of trauma. Within an interdisciplinary framework, this study...

What is "postirony"? First and foremost, it is a response to the ironic zeitgeist. Moreover, it is the key to understanding a specific form of literature. The contemporary reader is familiar with and - unfortunately - used to postmodernism's ironic, self-reflexive metafiction. Authors like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers choose a different path: despite the reign of contemporary irony, they strive to reach the reader on a level beyond, cognitively as well as emotionally - they claim to be sincere and true. Focusing largely on nonfiction by these authors, Lukas Hoffmann explores the means...

Daniel Defoe's work displays a keen interest in stories of supernatural encounters. After considering how one might prove supernatural occurrences and whether one can trust eyewitness accounts, Defoe demonstrates that more is at stake. Like his contemporaries, Defoe wonders about the range of scientific insight and the moral and epistemological ramifications of unchallenged trust and faith. His transformations of the supernatural probe the boundaries of knowledge and evidence and play with the limits of cognition, emphasizing the inseparability of mind and emotion.

Continually attacked by government officials and educators, installment or colportage novels fascinated their underprivileged readers. Melodrama and sensation were essential ingredients. The hurriedly written, rambling plots sought to electrify fantasies of women with new turn-of-the-century aspirations. They also fused raw political ideas offering populist and paternalist solutions to society's challenges and tensions. Through the study of one rare, surviving colportage novel, Peter S. Fisher offers an unusual mental and visual panorama of a nearly vanished Wilhelmine world.

Realismusdebatten und literarische Strömungen der italienischen Nachkriegsliteratur legen meist eine Überlappung von außersprachlicher Realität und deren Darstellung im Medium des Romans zugrunde. Einige Literaturschaffende entziehen sich dieser Tradition jedoch, indem sie sich auf ästhetische, politische und explizit an ein neues soziopolitisches Paradigma der Nachkriegszeit geknüpfte Gesichtspunkte beziehen. Britta Köhler-Hoff legt dar, wie dabei nicht nur die Abbildbarkeit der Wirklichkeit durch Literatur infrage gestellt wird, sondern auch - teilweise im Rahmen eigener...