In this little book, I will be showing you my favourite treks, hikes and tours through the Münster region. I have noticed that there are rarely any foreign tourists who visit these spots. This English version of my book is meant to make it easier for English-speaking readers to discover the Münster region - or Münsterland in German. All of these places are freely accessible and are suitable for nature expeditions with children. They are comparatively short, but very diverse.
While the popular talk of English common sense in the eighteenth century might seem a by-product of familiar Enlightenment discourses of rationalism and empiricism, this book argues that terms such as ‘common sense’ or ‘good sense’ are not simply synonyms of applied reason. On the contrary, the discourse of common sense is shaped by a defensive impulse against the totalizing intellectual regimes of the Enlightenment and the cultural climate of change they promote, in order to contain the unbounded discursive proliferation of modern learning. Hence, common sense discourse has a vital regulatory function in cultural negotiations of political and intellectual change in eighteenth-century Britain against the backdrop of patriotic national self-concepts. This study discusses early eighteenth-century common sense in four broad complexes, as to its discursive functions that are ethical (which at that time implies aesthetic as well), transgressive (as a corrective), political (in patriotic constructs of the nation), and repressive (of otherness). The selection of texts in this study strikes a balance between dominant literary culture – Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson – and the periphery, such as pamphlets and magazine essays, satiric poems and patriotic songs.
The eighteen essays collected in this volume address a wide range of topics and examine the work of various contemporary playwrights. The essays investigate how and to what extent the aesthetics of contemporary drama reflect upon the postmodern preference for difference, plurality, uncertainty, ambiguity, hybridity, fragmentation, or performativity; for the deconstruction of teleological history and the subject; for carnivalesque playfulness and irony; but also for the non-representable sublime in art. The essays reveal how vital postmodernist discourse and poetics are in the field of contemporary theatre and drama in English, and they also set out to prove how productive contemporary Anglophone playwrights are in producing new narratives and cutting-edge images which interact with our readings.
