In contrast to narrative, description is a much less researched phenomenon, and where it so far has found attention at all, scholars have almost always discussed it with fiction in mind. The all but exclusive concentration on literature has hitherto obscured the fact that description transcends literature and indeed the verbal media in general and is not only a transgeneric but also a transmedial phenomenon that can be found in many other media and arts. This book is a pioneering interdisciplinary study of description since it for the first time undertakes to close this research lacuna by...

Strange as it may seem, Cervantes's novel Don Quixote, Marc Forster's film Stranger than Fiction, Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pere Borrell del Caso's painting "Escaping Criticism" reproduced on the cover of the present volume and Mozart's sextet "A Musical Joke" all share one common feature: they include a meta-dimension. Metaization - the movement from a first cognitive, referential or communicative level to a higher one on which first-level phenomena self-reflexively become objects of reflection, reference and communication in their own right - is in fact a common feature...

This volume contains a selection of nine essays with an interdisciplinary perspective. They were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was held at Edinburgh University in June 2007 and was organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on self-reference in various systematic, historical and intermedial ways. Self-reference - including, as a special case, metareference (the self-conscious reflection on music, literature and other medial concerns) - is explored, among...

One possible description of the contemporary medial landscape in Western culture is that it has gone 'meta' to an unprecedented extent, so that a remarkable 'meta-culture' has emerged. Indeed, 'metareference', i.e. self-reflexive comments on, or references to, various kinds of media-related aspects of a given medial artefact or performance, specific media and arts or the media in general is omnipresent and can, nowadays, be encountered in 'high' art and literature as frequently as in their popular counterparts, in the traditional media as well as in new media. From the Simpsons, pop music,...

Readers who appear to be lost in a storyworld, members of theatre or cinema audiences who are moved to tears while watching a performance, beholders of paintings who are absorbed by the representations in front of them, players of computer games entranced by the fictional worlds in which they interactively participate - all of these mental states of imaginative immersion are variants of 'aesthetic illusion', as long as the recipients, although thus immersed, are still residually aware that they are experiencing not real life but life-like representations created by artefacts. Aesthetic...

The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.