Brigitte Johanna Glaser Book order

With its particular focus on ‘transformations’ and ‘transgressions,’ this volume attempts to identify and explore phenomena that reflect the crossing of boundaries of various kinds, be they generic, aesthetic, linguistic, or production-related ones. The twenty-eight papers in this book have been selected from contributions to the conference on “Transgressions / Transformations: Literature and Beyond” held at the University of Göttingen under the auspices of CISLE (Centre of the International Study of Literatures in English) based at the University of Innsbruck. The book hopes to throw new light on the occasionally subversive (narrative and content-related) strategies on the part of the authors discussed and presents personal observations by well-known writers on the transformations they themselves experienced in the course of their lives and careers. The contributors to this volume investigated the crossing of formal and thematic boundaries as well as generic transformations against the background of an increasingly globalized world, and addressed the following topics: literary, cultural, and social transgressions and transformations, and their respective connections with transculturality; transmedial approaches in Anglophone literatures and cultures; new forms of pursuing or subverting postcolonial interests; literary evaluations of the post-human; as well as recent explorations of post-ethnicity and cosmopolitanism.

This collection of critical essays investigates various forms of loss portrayed in late 20th- and early 21st-century Anglophone fiction. Loss of individuals, places, identity, values, treasured objects and moments frequently causes a reconsideration of life among literary characters and narrators. Making use of theoretical approaches from the areas of psychology, postcolonial studies, narratology or gender studies, the essays analyse contemporary fiction with regard to its multi-layered representational capacities of rendering loss. They examine various forms of fictionalisation, among them also memoirs, semi-historical fiction and graphic narratives. Concepts and keywords which are used in exploring the subject matter are the following: assessing the connection of loss and mourning; dealing with loss through the process of aestheticisation; recovering lost objects through memory; and representing nostalgically the absent.

This study explores a selection of seventeenth-century memoirs, diaries and letters to show how attempts at literary self-fashioning led to the establishment of a tradition of secular autobiography in England. Samples of self-writing by Margaret Cavendish, Ann Fanshawe, Anne Halkett, Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn, Dorothy Osborne and John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester) are examined as texts which originated at the intersection of various factors, such as the social and political upheaval during the midcentury, the new sense of self evoked by changes in science, philosophy, and religion, and the general movement at the time towards subjectivity in almost all literary genres. This study furthermore argues that the turn towards literary self-fashioning was conducive to the development of the English novel.