Sylvia Mayer Books

Since the 1980s, „risk“ has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in the social sciences. Risk theory and risk research in these disciplines have shown that pervasive risk awareness has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in our period of late modernity. The essays assembled in this volume extend risk research in the humanities to literary and cultural studies and analyze a wide range of literary and audiovisual texts that imagine human encounters with environmental risk in North America. They are grouped into three sections. The first section focuses on representations of the risk of global climate change in several climate change novels; the second section concentrates on the representation of the nuclear risk in non-fictional and fictional texts as well as in film; the third section draws particular attention to the relevance of genre in the representation of a variety of environmental risks, genres ranging from poetry to posthuman fiction to Hollywood disaster movies and video games.

The book highlights Harriet Beecher Stowe's prolific career, showcasing her ability to engage with various audiences while navigating shifting economic and cultural landscapes. It emphasizes her versatility across genres and the critical resurgence of her work since the 1970s, positioning her writings as significant contributions to American literature. Edited by Sylvia Mayer and Monika Mueller, the collection aims to broaden the understanding of Stowe's impact and relevance beyond her most famous work, "Uncle Tom's Cabin."