Research

The PhDnet programme feeds upon the research profiles of the participating institutions and consequently includes a wide range of topics.

The time focus of the selected research projects aims at the second half of the 20th and the beginning 21st century. Far from assuming homogeneity of this period’s literary production, the time frame facilitates a close collaboration and interaction of the network’s junior researchers.

This volume holds a number of contributions from a conference held at Stockholm University 2–4 September, 2010: (Re)Contextualizing Literary and Cultural History. The aim of the conference was to gather scholars from a variety of disciplines, not only to investigate material or literary history and culture but also to bring theoretical aspects from different ­ elds of research into play. The conference thus brought together scholars to (re-)examine the importance of historical perspectives in literary studies, and to scrutinize the impact of cultural studies on early modern scholarship. A selection of revised papers was chosen for publication in this volume. It is divided into three parts: I Theorizing Literary and Cultural History II Ordering Thoughts—Making Sense of the World, and III Communicating Things and Thoughts.

Preface and Acknowledgements

I. THEORIZING LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY

Ansgar Nünning: No Contextualization without Literary Theory and Concepts: Problems, Kinds and Criteria of Contextualizing Literary History

Maik Bierwirth: Context—Intertext: A Prerequisite of Cultural Relevance and Value

II. ORDERING THOUGHTS – MAKING SENSE OF THE WORLD

Cora Dietl: Early Modern Dramaturgy of “Horror”

Angela Locatelli: Landscaping Literature in Early Modern England: Praxis, Gnosis and the Shifting Knowledge of Literature

Carin Franzén: The Legacy of Courtly Love and the Feminine Position

Mário Gomes: Framing the Fire: Poetological Notes on Robert Walser’s Early Short Prose

Maria Granic-White: A Prohibitive Presence by Language: Never the Father, Always the Son

Māra Grudule: The Dawn of Latvian Poetics (1697) and its Resonance in 19^th-Century Literature

Cordelia Heß: Serving the Mighty: Schemes of Social Distinction in Catechetical and Penitential Literature for Lay People in the 15^th century

Nina Karlström: Praising a Queen and a New Era? Gender and Rhetoric in One German-Language Panegyrical Text Written in Connection With the Coronation of Ulrika Eleonora the Younger of Sweden

Erland Sellberg: The Impact of Education on Early Modern Political Culture

III. COMMUNICATING THINGS AND THOUGHTS

Jill Bepler: Traditions of Reading, Writing and Collecting: Books in the Lives of Dynastic Women in Early Modern Germany

Peter Davidson: “The Great Minerva of the Goths” and Other Manifestations of Baroque Internationalism

Inga Elmqvist Söderlund: A Material Turn? The Contexts of Early Modern Material Scientific Heritage

Anna Maria Forssberg: The Information State: War and Communication in Sweden during the 17^th Century

At times of crisis and revolution such as ours, diagnoses of crucial junctures and ruptures – ‘turning points’ – in the continuous flow of history are more prevalent than ever. Analysing literary, cinematic and other narratives, the volume seeks to understand the meanings conveyed by different concepts of turning points, the alternative concepts to which they are opposed when used to explain historical change, and those contexts in which they are unmasked as false and over-simplifying constructions. Literature and film in particular stress the importance of turning points as a sensemaking device (as part of a character’s or a community’s cultural memory), while at the same time unfolding the constructive and hence relative character of turning points. Offering complex reflections on the notion of turning points, literary and filmic narratives are thus of particular interest to the present volume.

Contents:

Ansgar Nünning/Kai Marcel Sicks: Introduction. Conceptualizing Turning Points: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Metaphorical Implications and New Horizons

I. CONCEPTS OF CHANGE IN NARRATIVE THEORY

Ansgar Nünning: “With the Benefit of Hindsight”: Features and Functions of Turning Points as a Narratological Concept and as a Way of Self-Making

Annette Simonis: Turning Points in the 19th-Century Novella. Poetic Negotiations and the Representation of Social Rituals

Pirjo Lyytikäinen: Iterative Narration and Other Forms of Resistance to Peripeties in Modernist Writing

Vincenzo Martella: The Missing Turning Points in the Story: Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften between Ethics and Epistemology

Robert Vogt: “If the Stranger hadn’t been there! … But he was!” The Causal, Virtual and Evaluative Dimensions of Turning Points in Alternate Histories, Science-Fiction Stories and Multiverse Narratives

II. NARRATIVES OF CULTURAL CHANGE IN LITERATURE AND VISUAL MEDIA

Peter Hanenberg: Long Waves or Vanishing Points? A Cognitive Approach to the Literary Construction of History

Lieven Ameel: On the Threshold. The Brothel and the Literary Salon as Heterotopias in Finnish Urban novels

Diana Gonçalves: (Re)Turn to Dystopia: Community Feeling in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village

Anna Rettberg: Remediating Turning Points for Conviviality and Englishness in Contemporary Black British Literature

Isabel Capeloa Gil: This is (Not) It. Rate, Rattle and Roll in the Struggle for Financial Narratives

III. TURNING POINT NARRATIVES IN LITERARY AND CINEMATIC LIFE-WRITING

Julia Faisst: Turning a Slave Into a Freeman: Frederick Douglass’s Use of Photography and the Invention of African American Fiction

Teresa Ferreira: Reframing Absence: Masquerade as Turning Point in Du Maurier and Hitchcock’s Rebecca

Hanna Mäkelä: Player in the Dark: Mourning over the Loss of the Moral Foundation of Art in Woody Allen’s Match Point

Elisa Antz: Roots, Seduction and Mestiςagem in José Eduardo Agualusa’s My father’s wives

Eleonora Ravizza: A Middle Passage to Modernity. Reflections on David Dabydeen’s Postmodern Slave Narrative A Harlot’s Progress

Linda Karlsson Hammarfelt: Becoming the ‘Other’: Metamorphosis and ‘Turning Points’ in Katja Lange-Müller and Yoko Tawada

IV. CONSTRUCTING TURNING POINTS IN LITERARY HISTORY

Kerstin Lundström: Lay pamphlets in Early Reformation: Turning Points in Religious Discourse

Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre: The King is Dead. Long Live… the Queen. Turning Points in Panegyric Writing – Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689)

Marilia dos Santos Lopes: Writing New Worlds. Eberhard Werner Happel and the Invention of a Genre

Rossana Bonadei: Dickens and The Pickwick Papers. Unstable Signs in a Transmodal Discourse

Heta Pyrhönen: Bridget Jones’s Diary: A Case Study of Austen Fan Fiction

Sabrina Kusche: Generic Trends Between and Beyond Book Covers

V. (DE)CONSTRUCTING TURNING POINTS IN LITERARY THEORY

Bo Pettersson: On the Linguistic Turns in the Humanities and Their Effect on Literary Studies

Angela Locatelli: Turning Points and Mutuality in Literature and Psychoanalysis

Claudia Egerer: The Speaking Animal Speaking the Animal