Sibylle Baumbach

Exploring literary fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction, this book illuminates the ways in which literary texts are designed, presented, and received. Detailed case studies include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan.

Literature and Fascination

This book explores literary fascination. Why do some texts capture us more than others; how do concepts of fascination evolve; what part does literature play in this; and how can literary fascination be pinpointed and conceptualised? Offering detailed case studies that include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan, this study investigates various mechanisms of fascination across different verbal media of attraction. It illuminates the ways in which these texts are designed, presented, and received and develops fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction that provides insight into our understanding of how perception functions with regard to literature and how it has evolved. Synthesizing these analyses, the book argues that narratives of fascination essentially work with medusamorphosis, a concept that takes its cue from the Gorgon Medusa and aids the analysis of key mechanisms used to elicit fascination.

Klaus Oschema

Lena Henningsen

This volume explores 'unknown time' as a cultural phenomenon, approaching past futures, unknown presents, and future pasts through a broad range of different disciplines, media, and contexts. As a phenomenon that is both elusive and fundamentally inaccessible, time is a key object of fascination. Throughout the ages, different cultures have been deeply engaged in various attempts to fill or make time by developing strategies to familiarize unknown time and to materialize and control past, present, or future time. Arguing for the perennial interest in time, especially in the unknown and unattainable dimension of the future, the contributions explore premodern ideas about eschatology and secular future, historical configurations of the perception of time and acceleration in fin-de-siècle Germany and contemporary Lagos, the formation of ‘deep time’ and ‘timelessness’ in paleontology and ethnographic museums, and the representation of time—past, present, and future alike—in music, film, and science fiction.

The Fascination with Unknown Time

Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy

Birgit Neumann

This book discusses the complex ways in which the novel offers a vibrant arena for critically engaging with our contemporary world and scrutinises the genre's political, ethical, and aesthetic value. Far-reaching cultural, political, and technological changes during the past two decades have created new contexts for the novel, which have yet to be accounted for in literary studies. Addressing the need for fresh transdisciplinary approaches that explore these developments, the book focuses on the multifaceted responses of the novel to key global challenges, including migration and cosmopolitanism, posthumanism and ecosickness, human and animal rights, affect and biopolitics, human cognition and anxieties of inattention, and the transculturality of terror. By doing so, it testifies to the ongoing cultural relevance of the genre. Lastly, it examines a range of 21st-century Anglophone novels to encourage new critical discourses in literary studies.

Sibylle Baumbach

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