Ursula Kluwick

Virginia Richter

From early colonial encounters to the ecological disasters of the twenty-first century, the performativity of contact has been a crucial element in the political significance of the beach. Conceptualising the beach as a creative trope and as a socio-cultural site, as well as an aesthetically productive topography, this collection examines its multiplicity of meanings and functions as a natural environment engendering both desire and fear in the human imagination from the Victorian period to the present. The contributors examine literature, film, and art, in addition to moments of encounter and environmental crisis, to highlight the beach as a social space inspiring particular codes of behaviour and specific discourses, as a geographical frontier between land and water, as an historical site of contact and conflict, and as a vacationscape promising regeneration and withdrawal from everyday life. The diversity of the beach is reflected in the geographical range, with essays on locales and texts from Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, South Africa, the United States, Polynesia, and New Zealand. Focusing on the changed function of the beach as a result of processes of industrialisation and the rise of a modern leisure and health culture, this interdisciplinary volume theorises the beach as a demarcater of the precarious boundary between land and the sea, as well as between nature and culture.

Reading Littoral Space

The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

Roger Lüdeke

In the transition to the Early Modern Age, drama forms the dominant genre. With its speed of production and its position between the written and the oral, between the urban ‘entertainment industry’ and courtly representation, drama is the text type best suited to dealing with the social, religious and political tensions of the age. This collected volume provides an overview of the English, French, Spanish and German variants of drama in the Early Modern Age, from the religious plays of the Middle Ages to the engagement with classics of the European Renaissance in the Romantic Age.

Das europäische Theater der Frühen Neuzeit

Theater im Aufbruch

Gender-Konstitution und Geschlechterkonflikt in Clarissa, Les liaisons dangereuses und Les infortunes de la vertu

Gewaltsame Lektüren

Barbara Buchenau

Barbara Buchenau and Virginia Richter’s Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires explores the legacies of different empires across various media, focusing on the spatial, temporal, and critical dimensions of what the editors term the post-empire imaginary.

Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires

Post-Empire Imaginaries?

Virginia Richter

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