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Focussing on Alexander Pope’s Dunciads and a wide selection of Lord Byron’s poems, Lahrsow shows that literary self-annotations rarely just explain a text. Rather, they multiply meanings and pit different voices against each other. Self-annotations serve to ambiguate the author’s self-presentation as well as the genre, tone, and overall interpretation of a text.
The study also examines how notes were employed for ‘social networking’ and how authors used self-annotations to address, and differentiate between, various groups of readerships.
Additionally, the volume sheds light on the wider literary and cultural context of self-annotations: How common were they during the long eighteenth century? What conventions governed them? And were they even read? The study hence combines literary analysis with insights into book history and the history of reading.
Die Progressive Era war eine Zeit rapiden gesellschaftlichen Wandels, geprägt durch ein spannungsvolles Gegeneinander von progressiven und konservativen Tendenzen, nicht zuletzt auch in Fragen der Geschlechterbeziehungen. Dieses Thema wurde auch in zahlreichen Stücken des zeitgenössischen Broadway-Theaters aufgegriffen, dessen rigides Regelkorsett jedoch kaum Spielraum für eine Behandlung der Thematik jenseits des vorgegebenen Konventionsrahmens ließ. Es gab allerdings vereinzelte Versuche, die ästhetischen und ideologischen Grenzen dieses Rahmens zu überwinden.
Auf diesen bislang kaum beachteten Aspekt richtet sich das spezifische Erkenntnisinteresse der vorliegenden Arbeit. An einer Reihe von ausführlichen Text-Kontext-Analysen ausgewählter Stücke demonstriert sie die Strategien, mit denen die betreffenden Autor(inn)en in einem subtilen Wechselspiel von Anpassung und Subversion ihre geschlechterpolitische Reformagenda gegen die Restriktionen des Kommerztheaters verteidigen und dabei auch im ästhetischen Bereich zu durchaus beachtlichen Leistungen fähig sind, und zeigt so, dass auch in dieser populärkulturellen Theaterform ein größeres Innovations- und Subversionspotential virulent war als ihr in der bisherigen Forschung gemeinhin zugesprochen wird.
This study is concerned with the ambiguity of Wuthering Heights which arises through a complex interplay of distinct but interdependent ambiguities of perception, narration, and the narrated world. In particular, it shows how specific ambiguous utterances (e.g. a clash of implicatures and presuppositions) are linked with each other and contribute to the global ambiguity of the text. In this way, not only the function of ambiguity for understanding Wuthering Heights is explored but also the function of Wuthering Heights for understanding ambiguity. The book should thus be of interest not only to Brontë scholars and Victorianists but also to literary scholars and linguists in general.
Drawing on both well-established and previously unknown sources, Michael Dopffel here offers a fundamental reappraisal of one of the defining narrative genres of the 17th and 18th centuries. Intricately connected to evolving discourses of natural philosophy, Protestant religion and popular literature, the apparition narratives portrayed in this work constitute a hybrid genre whose interpretations and literary functions retained the ambiguity of their subject matter. Simultaneously an empirically approachable phenomena and a religious experience, witnesses and writers translated the spiritual characteristics of apparitions into distinct literary forms, thereby shaping conceptions of ghosts, whether factual or fictional, to this day.