Annette Kern-Stähler

Elizabeth Robertson

This collection of essays breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Literature and the Senses

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means by which literary texts engage with, open up, or make uncertain dominant views of the nature of perception. Considering the ways in which literary texts intersect with and diverge from scientific, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives, these essays explore a wide variety of literary moments of sensation including: the interspecies exchange of a look between a swan and a young Indigenous Australian girl; the sound of bees as captured in an early modern poem; the noxious smell of the 'Great Stink' that recurs in the Victorian novel; the taste of an eggplant registered in a poetic performance; tactile gestures in medieval romance; and the representation of a world in which the interdependence of human beings with the purple hibiscus plant is experienced through all five senses. The collection builds upon and breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies, focusing on what makes literature especially suitable to engaging with, contributing to, and challenging our perennial understandings of, the senses.

Nicole Nyffenegger

This volume explores practices of secrecy and surveillance in medieval and early modern England. The ten contributions by Swiss and international scholars (including Paul Strohm, Sylvia Tomasch, Karma Lochrie, and Richard Wilson) address in particular the intersections of secrecy and surveillance with gender and identity, public and private spheres, religious practices, and power structures. Covering a wide range of English literary texts from Old English riddles to medieval romances, the Book of Margery Kempe, and the plays and poems of Shakespeare, these essays seek to contribute to our understanding of the practices of secrecy, exclusion, and disclosure as well as to the much-needed historicisation of Surveillance Studies called for in the opening article by Sylvia Tomasch. ---

Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England

Klaus Stierstorfer

A Case Book

Literary Encounters of Fundamentalism

Wietse de Boer

Beatrix Busse

These essays offer a fresh perspective on the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern period.

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

Heinz Antor

Gordon Bölling

Ever since the first exploratory expeditions in the early modern period, North America has epitomized to Europeans a promise and the hope for the fulfilment of great expectations, be it of more freedom, greater wealth, social liberation or religious tolerance. While numerous features in this dialogic intercontinental relationship will hold true for North America in its entirety, the vast northern territories which we know as Canada today began to emerge early on as a specific iconic location in European mind-maps, and they definitely acquired a distinctive profile after the formation of the USA. As a rich source of cultural exchange and an important partner in political and economic cooperation Canada has come to occupy an important position in the cultural discourses of many European nations. It is these refractions and images of Canada which this volume thoroughly explores in European literature and culture. The contributions include literature, philosophy, language, life-writing and the concept of 'Heimat' (homeland) as well as the cultural impact of the World Wars. While there is an emphasis on literary texts, other fields of cultural representation are also included.

Annette Kern-Stähler

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