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Reading Jack Kerouac's classic On the Road through Virginia Woolf's canonical A Room of One's Own, the author of this book examines a genre in North American literature which, despite its popularity, has received little attention in literary and cultural criticism: women's road narratives. The study shows how women's literature has inscribed itself into the American discourse of the Whitmanesque "open road", or, more generally, the "freedom of the road". Women writers have participated in this powerful American myth, yet at the same time also have rejected that myth as fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and power structures, and modified it in the process of writin...
In the last few decades, the phrase “spatial turn” has received increased attention in German Studies, inspired by developments within the discipline of geography. The volume German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives engages the analytical category of space and the spatial turn in the context of German women’s writing. The collection of essays divides its discussion of spatiality in German literature into sections that reflect privileged sites within the current scholarly debates around space. Essays look to such issues as environmentalism, globalization, migration and immigration, concerns of belonging, points of encounter, spaces and places of (im-)mobility, topographies of departure and arrival, movement, motion, or shifting identities. German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives continues the challenge to understand the representation of space and place in German language texts by focusing on how spatial theory figures into the realm of feminist thinking and writing.
This book traces artists’ theories of constructive space in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on these concepts and recent theories on space, it develops a methodology termed ‘Spatial Art History’ that conceives of artworks as physical spatio-temporal things, which produce the social, to overcome the reductive understanding of art as a mere mirror or facilitator of society.
This book is the first study to tackle the relationship between landscape and religion in-depth. Author Matthias Egeler overviews previous theories of the relationship between landscape and religion and then pushes this theorizing further with a rich case study: the supernatural landscape of the Icelandic Westfjords. There, religion and the supernatural--from churches to elf hills--are ubiquitous in the landscape and, as Egeler shows, this example sheds entirely new light on core aspects of the relationship between landscape, religion, and the supernatural.
The impetus behind this collection of essays was a curiosity shared by the editors concerning the relation between the flesh and the text in French and francophone literature. This subject is explored here in readings of works by, among others, Rabelais, Diderot, Sade, Proust, Beckett, Djebar, Nothomb, Delvig and Nobécourt.
Over the past five decades, the field of religion-and-science scholarship has experienced a considerable expansion. This volume explores the historical and contemporary perspectives of the relationship between religion, technology and science with a focus on South and East Asia. These three areas are not seen as monolithic entities, but as discursive fields embedded in dynamic processes of cultural exchange and transformation. Bridging these arenas of knowledge and practice traditionally seen as distinct and disconnected, the book reflects on the ways of exploring the various dimensions of their interconnection. Through its various chapters, the collection provides an examination of the use ...
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Snæfellsjökull is one of Iceland’s most famous volcanoes. It is there that Jules Verne located the entrance to the centre of the earth; it is the abode of a medieval saga hero and the location of one of Halldór Laxness’s novels. Travellers, painters, poets, and film-makers have been drawn to it in equal measure – while at the same time and against all expectations, others seem unfazed: as famous as the mountain is on a national and international stage, local folklore and medieval historiography have amazingly little interest in it. Clearly, Snæfellsjökull is not the same to everyone. This volume presents a survey of the place of Snæfellsjökull in the Icelandic and European imagination. It adapts the paradigm of geocriticism, which shifts the focus of the scholarly investigation from the work of individual authors to the multitude of views that different authors, artists, and practitioners have on a single place. The results of the perambulation of Snæfellsjökull presented here show that both its cultural and literary history, as well as the paradigm of geocriticism, open up broad vistas that amply repay the effort necessary to tackle this mountain.
The volume assembles fresh treatments on the flâneur in literature, film and culture from a variety of angles. Its individual contributions cover established as well as previously unnoticed textual and filmic source materials in a historical perspective ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The range of topics covered demonstrates the ongoing productivity of flânerie as a viable paradigm for the artistic approach to urban culture and the continuing suitability of flânerie as an analytic category for the scholarly examination of urban representation in the arts. This productiveness also extends to the questioning, re-evaluation, and enhancement of flânerie’s theoretical foundations as they were laid down by Walter Benjamin and others. The work will be particularly relevant for students and scholars of literary studies, film studies and gender studies, as well as for theoretical approaches to flânerie as an important aspect of urban culture.
Before skyscrapers forever transformed the landscape of the modern metropolis, the conveyance that made them possible had to be created. Invented in New York in the 1850s, the elevator became an urban fact of life on both sides of the Atlantic by the early twentieth century. While it may at first glance seem a modest innovation, it had wide-ranging effects, from fundamentally restructuring building design to reinforcing social class hierarchies by moving luxury apartments to upper levels, previously the domain of the lower classes. The cramped elevator cabin itself served as a reflection of life in modern growing cities, as a space of simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, constantly in motion...