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Life criticism and De Quincey's ethical concern over the aestheticiability of murder Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-14 Yingjie Duan, Junwu Tian
The self‐reflexive tendency in De Quincey's seemingly Kantian aestheticization of murder allows some leeway in deciphering his underlying ethical concerns. As “On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth” shows, De Quincey engages in a special kind of life writing that can be termed “life criticism,” which is not naively referential but revelatory, translating the autobiographical records of memories, experiences
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Travels with BERT: Surfacing the intertextuality in Hans Christian Andersen's travel writing and fairy tales through the network lens of large language model‐based topic modeling Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Timothy R. Tangherlini, Ruofei Chen
Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales have garnered the greatest popular and scholarly attention despite the interdependence of works across the broad range of his artistic production. We read Andersen's fairy tales in concert with his travel writing to highlight the intertextual aspects that cross these seemingly distinct genres. We leverage recent advances in large language models (LLM) and network
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„Nichts verlangte er von seiner Umwelt, außer dass er sie provozieren und vor den Kopf stoßen durfte“: Jesus‐Figuren in der modernen deutschsprachigen und polnischen Literatur Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-20 Marek Jakubów
ZusammenfassungDie zahlreichen Romane in der deutschsprachigen und polnischen Literatur, die in den letzten, durch die Säkularisierungsprozesse geprägten Jahrzehnten erschienen sind und die Figur Jesu thematisieren, bilden kein einheitliches Phänomen und ergeben aus komparatistischer Sicht erhebliche Differenzen. Sie sind auf die andersartigen Deutungsmuster der romantischen Tradition zurückzuführen
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“Partialist” and “universalist”: American exceptionalism in antebellum writing on national identity Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-02 Iulian Cananau
In this article, I analyze six well‐known antebellum essays on US national identity from the perspective of their engagement with the contemporary exceptionalist discourse. My focus is on their representations of the particular and the universal, whose paradoxical relationship lies at the core of all national exceptionalisms. I approach antebellum exceptionalism as part of the history in which the
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“A saint, a heroine, and a town”: The incarnation of “rose” and poetics of resistance in Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-02 Yi Cai
Edwidge Danticat in her novel Claire of the Sea Light (2013) delineates a group of determined women who actively challenge the patriarchal norms prevalent in Haiti. This article conducts a thorough textual analysis focusing on the imagery of the “rose” and its intricate connections with women in the narrative. Through the elaborate naming of Ville Rose, the incarnation of rose as female figures in
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The deixis of literature: On the conditions for recognizing computers as authors Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-26 Hannes Bajohr
Taking the deictic judgment that is the modernist gesture of declaring something to be art as a starting point, this essay suggests an analogous deixis as a necessary condition for literature. This deixis also can serve as the basis for discussing the expectations of computer‐generated texts. Against the idea that computers or AI systems need only produce sufficiently good output in order to be considered
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Camilla's traces: Movement as an analytical key to literary history Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Eva von Contzen, Karin Kukkonen
In this article, we develop a framework for the analysis of ‘movement’ in literary texts. We focus on characters, translation and transmission, thereby going beyond, on the one hand, a stylistic analysis of individual passages, and, on the other hand, the linear enchainment of scenes and summaries underlying much of the narratological discussions around movement, speed and pace. We will develop this
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“An enormous sadness touched with rue”: The pathos of oneness in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Russell M. Hillier
In Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, the novel's titular protagonist Cornelius Suttree resists his father's self‐righteous conviction in the Nietzschean “pathos of distance” by living among Knoxville's helpless and destitute and testing the theory that “there is nothing occurring in the streets.” Among the city's underclass, Suttree finds a commonality in human suffering and comes to the profound realization
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La contevelle mauricienne d'après Ananada Devi. Le cas du Poids des êtres Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-06 Katarzyna Gadomska
RésuméLe but du présent article consiste à présenter des traits génériques de la forme narrative brève qu’est la contevelle mauricienne. Le corpus textuel à analyser est un recueil de récits, Le poids des êtres, d'Ananda Devi, l'une des écrivaines mauriciennes les plus célèbres. L'article examine les rapports entre la contevelle, le conte et la nouvelle. La contevelle semble être une forme hybride
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« La liberté, c'est le vent ». Histoire et humanisme dans Le chant du retour de Vera Feyder Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Judyta Niedokos
RésuméLe présent article se propose d'analyser le lien entre l'histoire et l'humanisme dans une pièce de théâtre de l'écrivaine belge Vera Feyder, intitulée Le chant du retour (1989). Commandé par la ville d'Arras pour célébrer le bicentenaire de la Révolution française et le révolutionnaire arrageois Maximilien de Robespierre, le drame amène dans l'action contemporaine la couche historique à travers
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Staging the Tories' Islamic Jihad against George I and the Whigs in Edward Young's The Revenge Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Hussein A. Alhawamdeh
This article analyzes Edward Young's nuanced employment of Islam and appropriation of the Qur'an, first translated into English as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649, to attack allegorically the Tories' aspirations to support James Francis Edward Stuart (1701–1766), who was nicknamed “the Old Pretender” by the Whigs and James III by the Tories, to restore Catholicism/Islam into Hanoverian England. Edward
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Gestures of neighbor-love: Literature, philosophy, and givenness Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Irina Hron
This article explores the literary, philosophical, and phenomenological dimensions of neighbor-love. Phenomenologically speaking, neighborly love must be given, that is, it must be given voluntarily through attitudes, actions, or gestures. But whom do we actually acknowledge as our neighbor, and why? Adopting a comparative literary approach, this paper argues that literature is not philosophy's adversary
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Landscapes of realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives. Volume I: Mapping realism. DirkGöttsche, RosaMucignat and RobertWeninger (Eds.), John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2021, pp. 814. €190/$285 (hbk). ISBN: 9789027208064 Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Yang Liu
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Landscapes of realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives. Volume II: Pathways through realism. Svend ErikLarsen, Steen BilleJørgensen and Margaret R.Higonnet (Eds.), Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2022. pp. 780. €190/$285 (hbk). ISBN: 978 90 272 1085 2 Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Shouren Wang
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La motivation littéraire. Du formalisme russe au constructivisme By HansFärnlöf, Paris: Classiques Garnier. 2022. pp. 273. ISBN: 9782406131038 Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Morten Nojgaard
Voici un ouvrage qui vient à son heure, puisque les questions de la cohérence, de la successivité et de la lisibilité du texte littéraire sont au cœur des préoccupations critiques actuelles. Travaillant depuis longtemps sur la structure du roman naturaliste dans un esprit proche de celui des études de Philippe Hamon sur les romans zoliens, Hans Färnlöf se risque à en élargir la perspective en proposant
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‘A random assembly of geometric forms’: Thing Theory in J. G. Ballard's and Ray Bradbury's short stories Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Marcin Tereszewski
Thing Theory is a relatively new field of research, developed largely by Bill Brown on the basis of an already existing new materialist movement with roots reaching back to Martin Heidegger's interrogation of the ontology of things in ‘Das Ding’. Focusing on the interconnectedness of objects, their modes of being and irreducible ‘thingness’, as well as the agency objects are shown to exert when freed
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Boreal ecopoetics: Christian Dotremont's site-specific writing in Sápmi Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Sami Sjöberg
Northern Fennoscandia entered Christian Dotremont's (1922–1979) imagination in 1956. The Belgian avant-gardist was comfortable in Central-European artistic milieus through his involvement in CoBrA (1948–1951), but a total of 12 journeys to Sápmi between 1956 and 1978 had a profound effect on his creative work, especially the logograms he is best known for. This article studies Dotremont's travel writings
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The degenerate spouse: Eugenics and divorce in Arabella Kenealy's The Marriage Yoke (1904) and Gabriele Reuter's ‘Eines Toten Wiederkehr’ (1901) Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-16 Fatima Borrmann
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenics emphasised human intervention to rectify a perceived distortion of the ‘natural’ evolutionary progress. One of the interventions advocated by eugenicists was the prevention of marriages that were deemed incompatible. The union between the ‘fit’ and the ‘unfit’ was constantly propagated as the reason behind the degeneration of the race
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Aerial withdrawal: An atmospheric reading of Monika Maron's Flugasche Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Monika Szczepaniak
In Monika Maron's Flugasche (1981)—the first novel from the GDR to deal with environmental issues—the poisoned atmosphere in the city of B. functions as an affective centre, around which emotions, actions and reactions of the main protagonist as well as of the other characters revolve. The journalist Josefa Nadler falls into the sphere of the environmental catastrophe and is overwhelmed by the atmospheric
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„Feurige Blitze in ihrem Kopf“: Hypersensitivität als Empathie in Marlen Haushofers Himmel, der nirgendwo endet Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Liselotte Van der Gucht
Der Beitrag schlägt einen neuen Blick auf den Roman Himmel, der nirgendwo endet (1966) der österreichischen Autorin Marlen Haushofer vor, indem eine Neurodiversitätsperspektive eingenommen wird. Die im Vergleich zur Norm alternative sowie höchst intensive Erfahrung der Hauptfigur Meta wird von einer Hypersensitivität charakterisiert, die eine Hyperempathie für Lebewesen und sogar unlebendige Objekte
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Attentional modulation in literary reading: A theoretical-empirical framework Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Inge van de Ven
When we think of a person engaged in the act of reading literary fiction, the mental image that readily comes to mind is one of focused concentration. In our current information age, such a form of reading seems especially necessary, and often lacking. This causes a change in how we read, often described in terms of close reading versus hyperreading. Literary reading is typically associated with the
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A look-back from the future: Anthropogenic crisis and memory in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-22 Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun
Referring to recent discussions on the challenges the concept of the Anthropocene poses for humanities and literary representation, this article investigates N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy as a narrative that addresses the crisis of imagination, in particular with respect to memory. Examining the tensions between individual, collective, and planetary memory, I read Jemisin's novels as an attempt
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“Order and adventure”: The political in Paul Auster's 4321 Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Meiping Zhang
Paul Auster's 4321 is on the surface organized around a multiplication of one's life story. This essay argues that the kind of textual multiplication developed in the novel can also be linked with an essential need to express the depth and breadth of the political. Looking at three forms of expression—journalism, film, and poetry—it analyzes their functions in creating openings into a public realm
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Poet as poem: The intermedial staging of A. E. Housman in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Huayu Yang, Bowen Wang
Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love (1997) offers the audience a dream-like voyage through the post-mortem reminiscences of the central character, A. E. Housman. The attempt to resurrect Housman, as the historical figure in real life, is suspended by the intertextual incorporation of Housman's poems, the both fictive and enigmatically private voice of which opens up the illusory closure of biographically
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New motherhood and eugenics in German women's political and popular fiction around 1900 Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Caroline Bland
Fictional texts have long functioned as a testing ground for new impulses in society. At the turn of the twentieth century many German feminists were demanding greater influence for women in public life not despite but because of their role as mothers. At the same time writers, scientists and activists from across the political spectrum were fascinated by eugenics, seeing this new ‘science’ as the
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The madness of unrestrained reason: Reason and madness in Molière's Le misanthrope Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-02 Benjamin Boysen
In Molière's celebrated Le misanthrope, the spectator is witness to an immensely funny, albeit profound staging of the limits of rationality. The comedy exhibits how an idealist idea of the pure sovereignty of reason is ridiculous, self-contradictory, and mad, since the distinction between ideality and reality, the universal and the particular, the social and the individual, is ignored or even dissolved
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Establishing a female intellectual identity in early modern Denmark Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Sabrina Ebbersmeyer
This article explores Birgitte Thott's (1610–1662) intellectual identity by investigating the paratexts to her translation of Seneca's philosophical works (1658) in a European context. Written partly by Thott herself and partly by other scholars, these texts assisted in creating Thott's public persona and in establishing Thott as a female intellectual in early modern Denmark. As there was a certain
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Exemplarity and reflexivity in literature: Towards an elucidation of the knowledge embedded in the literary text Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-28 Julio Jensen
The question of the relation between philosophy and literature is, in the present contribution, approached from the notion of reflexivity as it appears in the thinking of Herder and Gadamer. Following up on Gadamer's critique of the Kantian and post-Kantian idea of the autonomy of art, literature is considered a reflective discourse that at an existential level harvests insights that can be used in
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Derrida and the exemplarity of literature Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Kristian Olesen Toft
Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks on the ambiguous role examples play in the passage between the universal and the singular revolve around an often-neglected point: any attempt to theorise exemplarity will itself be subject to the law it seeks to account for. This oversight limits scholarship on the subject, but may be amended by returning to the loci classici on exemplarity in Derrida's Glas, La
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Creation, intersubjectivity and the novel: Unamuno on life in Cómo se hace una novela Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Katrine Helene Andersen
This article shows that, in Miguel de Unamuno, both philosophy and literature contribute to an intellectual project that has to do with life. I will argue that Unamuno, in Cómo se hace una novela, presents a philosophy of life that understands human life as an intersubjective creation. We create life in the same way we do a novel, that is to say, through intersubjective dialectics. Cómo se hace una
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Rhetorik und Schriftbildlichkeit von literarischen Pantomimen Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Nina Tolksdorf
Da sich die Pantomime als sogenannte „wortlose Kunst“ ihrer Verschriftlichung eigentlich entzieht, sind einige Texte der Pantomime um 1900 bezüglich ihrer Darstellungsverfahren besonders erfinderisch. Sie enthalten Notationen, Bilder, Zeichnungen und generieren rhetorische Figuren, um die Bewegung des Körpers auf der Bühne in den Texten selbst zu übersetzen. Die Ergebnisse dieser Übertragungen sind
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Theorie und Praxis der Pantomime zwischen Frankreich und Österreich/Deutschland: Aspekte eines Kulturtransfers Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Catherine Mazellier-Lajarrige
Der Beitrag untersucht Formen und Wege des Kulturtransfers zwischen Frankreich und Österreich, bzw. Deutschland, im Bereich der Pantomime, insbesondere unter dem Blickwinkel der „Texttheatralität“ (Poschmann). Bei vielen deutschsprachigen Pantomimenautoren ist die Begegnung mit der Pariser Pantomime, die 1888 mit der Gründung des „Cercle Funambulesque“ ihre Wiedergeburt feiert, für Theorie und Praxis
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The problem of the body in Romantic Studies: On the strengths and limits of New Materialism Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Martin Fog Arndal
Within the last couple of years, the recently established field of research called “New Materialism” has made its entry into studies of Romanticism, and especially that of the Romantic body. Hitherto a subject explored through the guises of medicine, anatomy, and physiology on the one hand and deconstruction and poststructuralism on the other, the body is now being re-interpreted within a field that
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The indigenous housekeeper: Colonies, sexuality and eugenics in Bendsjé (1931), Le coup de chicotte (1930) and Wie Grete aufhörte ein Kind zu sein (1913) Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Robrecht De Boodt
As colonial regimes became more entrenched, the African indigenous ‘housekeeper’ became a popular and highly controversial topic in Belgian and German colonial literature. Indigenous women were euphemistically called ménagères or ‘housekeepers’ to veil their sexual function at a colonial's residence. In a period of history where racial and eugenic anxieties ran rampant across Europe, the colonies seemingly
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“The Curse of the Stillborn”: Margery Lawrence's Egyptian troubling of imperial eugenics Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-06 Leanne Rae Darnbrough
Despite the broad popularity of Britain's imperial project in the 1920s (among Britons), fears of native fecundity coupled with burgeoning support for the “science” of eugenics fomented a cultural discourse keen to bolster British claims to inherent superiority, and thus, to a legitimacy of their colonial aims. Egypt was a prime literary setting for teasing at various aspects of the concept of the
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Eugenic appropriations of the goddess Isis: Reproduction and racial superiority in theosophical feminist writings Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-06 Jessica A. Albrecht
The goddess Isis continues to be an influential figure for the notion of the Divine Feminine in contemporary esoteric and popular thought. However, looking back into the history of modern esotericism, the image of the goddess Isis has been used by Theosophists such as Florence Farr and Frances Swiney to argue for their feminist and more importantly eugenic interpretations of the power of that goddess
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Austrian memory to be discarded, deformed and deposited: An analysis of Eva Menasse's Dunkelblum Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Xiaohu Jiang
From the perspective of memory studies, this paper analyzes the unique Austrian mechanisms and mentalities regarding its Nazi memory across generations, as reflected in Eva Menasse's Dunkelblum (2021). This novel is another of Menasse's critical observations of Austria's collective silence and distinctive processes of discarding, deforming, and depositing its Nazi history and memory. Exceeding the
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Y a-t-il un avenir après la crise climatique ? De La fantastique Odyssée de Chérif Arbouz Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Magdalena Malinowska
La crise climatique devient de plus en plus souvent le sujet des œuvres de fiction, non seulement dans l'aire culturelle anglo-saxonne. Le présent article soumet à l'analyse un exemple de fiction climatique postcoloniale francophone, à savoir La fantastique Odyssée de l'Algérien Chérif Arbouz, dans le but de reconstruire la vision du futur y proposée. L'étude des procédés littéraires engagés par l'auteur
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What is a protagonist? Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Anastasia Ladefoged Larn, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan
Early modern French dramas c.1550–1660 stage a multitude of female figures. Two of the most popular were the Greek-Egyptian ruler Cleopatra and the Carthaginian noblewoman Sophonisbe who all in all appear in no less than 13 French tragedies from this period including some of the period's most important ones. In this article we undertake the first comparative and structural investigation of both figures'
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‘Two Armies flye in…’: Battle scenes in English Renaissance theatre Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Christian Dahl
One of the most spectacular characteristics of English Renaissance theatre is the propensity for battle scenes. Between 1576 and 1616, battle scenes appear in a third of all surviving plays and, judging from the titles, the frequency may have been even higher in the lost plays. The popularity of battle scenes is indicative both of early modern fascination with history as spectacle and of the imminence
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Increasing access to ephemeral prints: How to construct and analyze a dataset from the Golden Age of literature in nineteenth-century Denmark Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Holger Berg
“Archives” and “distant reading” have become common concepts in literary criticism following the mass digitization of books and newspapers. Though these two sources provide gigantic amounts of data available in digitized collections and catalogues, they rarely encompass all printed texts preserved from any given period. A third type is mostly left out: ephemeral prints. This poses a problem for literary
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How Stephen King writes and why: Language, immersion, emotion Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Marc Hye-Knudsen, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, Mathias Clasen
Many successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if so, can it truly account for the success of their novels? We dissect and examine three pieces of writing advice from Stephen King's book On Writing (2000). King counsels writers to (1) write in a simple language to aid readers' narrative immersion; (2) avoid -ly adverbs, especially in dialogue attribution;
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Deep distant reading: The rise of realism in Scandinavian literature as a case study Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-07 Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Matthew Wilkens
In this article we make a case for a synchronic and contextualizing perspective on the scaling of literary data, one which qualifies and expands the data points in terms of depth, or thickness, through the help of metadata on the social and historical conditions of the texts. Our case study is an investigation of the rise and impact of realism in a corpus of more than 800 Danish and Norwegian novels
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Embedded mental states in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief and uneven distribution of narratorial attention Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-06 Haifeng Hui
The study of literary characters has been acknowledged to be a thorny field. Since Alex Woloch's The One vs. the Many (2003), exciting advances are scarce. The present article proposes cognitive narratology based on Theory of Mind, which focuses on multiple levels of embedded mental states that reflect and keep track of other characters' mental states (conveniently summarized as “I know that you know
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Revisiting Pontoppidan: Sentiment analysis and topic modelling on ‘Eagle's Flight’ Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Evgenios Vlachos, Kamilla Jensen Husen
Our aim is to examine the evolution of Henrik Pontoppidan's authorship by comparing the five different editions that exist of his short story ‘Eagle's Flight’ (‘Ørneflugt’), as well as enriching the understanding of the story. We attempt to validate the existing views of ‘Eagle's Flight’ based on classic literary analysis (qualitative part) by approaching them from a different perspective, that of
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Foreword to the Special Issue "Between Proximity and Distance: The Affordances of Scale in Computational Literary Studies" Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Lucie Duggan
The computational turn in literary scholarship has seen the proliferation of studies incorporating hundreds and thousands of texts—including novels, plays, poems—that have demonstrated the many benefits of scale in understanding the broad outlines of literary history. Yet while data-driven studies become an increasingly visible part of humanities departments, and methods developed in and borrowed from
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“Spiders […] stringing webs through her head”: Representations of memory in Anthony Doerr's “Memory Wall” and Meredith Westgate's The Shimmering State Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-03 Sonia Front
Although science has demonstrated that memories are flexible mental constructions, rather than a stable record of the past preserved in an internal archive, fiction keeps fantasizing about technologies that will locate memories in the brain and edit or download them into an external medium. Anthony Doerr's short story “Memory Wall” (2010) and Meredith Westgate's novel The Shimmering State (2021) continue
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A woman's tradition? Quantifying gender difference in the Child ballads Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Lucie Duggan
While the major ballad-collecting efforts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were largely carried out by men, the academic discourse surrounding ballads gendered traditional balladry—orally transmitted narrative poetry—as a woman's tradition. Subsequent ballad scholarship of the twentieth century perpetuated the antiquarian notion of a specifically female ballad tradition, and yet it has remained
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Levels of presence in the drama text: Between close and distant reading1 Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-06-24 Ulla Kallenbach, Anna Lawaetz
Digital studies of drama have tended to emphasise the written text and network analyses. As theatre scholars, we have approached the field from a different perspective by focusing on levels of presence. This includes the embodied presence of not only the speaking characters, but also the non-speaking characters and the imagined characters mentioned by characters present on stage. This in turn includes
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Performative translation, and the impossibility of Romantic mediation in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1834) Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Dominic Bentley-Hussey, Brecht de Groote
Whilst Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus has sparked a variety of critical interpretations since its publication, it has never been read as a pseudotranslation. Building upon recent research in this field, this article proposes that through its pseudotranslational imitation of late-Romantic periodical translations, Sartor critiques the highly self-aware performativity on which this writing is founded
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(Post-)industrial optics: The role of the Hereford Mappa Mundi in Christopher Meredith's Shifts Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-07 Aleksander Bednarski
Christopher Meredith's novel Shifts (1988) is firmly established in the canon of English-language Welsh literature as one of the most accomplished representatives of (post-)industrial fiction, a genre this small country has produced in quality and amount ‘out of all proportion to its size or population’ (Knight, 2004). The aim of this paper is to explore the role of the medieval Mappa Mundi which two
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Feminist Gothic: Anonymity and intersectionality of oppression in Eva Figes's The Tenancy Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-01 Lian Xu
The Gothic genre has historically been adopted by women writers to express their subversive gender views. In The Tenancy, Figes depicts the systematic oppression of the patriarchal society against women during the latter half of the twentieth century. She also revises the traditional Gothic topos of “oppression” in terms of three aspects: victim, intersectionality, and the source of oppression. Female
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Herman Bang als Dichter Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Katharina Fürholzer
Herman Bang (1857–1912) zählt zu den bekanntesten und angesehensten Autoren der dänischen Literaturgeschichte. Das anhaltende Interesse an seinem Werk begründet sich dabei insbesondere auf seine (impressionistischen) Romane, Geschichten und Novellen. Dass Bang auch einen Gedichtband veröffentlichte (Digte, 1889; Gedichte) ist jedoch weitgehend in Vergessenheit geraten. Vor diesem Hintergrund möchte
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Autopsies on the body of nature: Dark ecology in Thomas Bernhard's Verstörung Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Bastian Ljung Franch
Verstörung—often considered a minor work by Bernhard—is a somewhat overlooked example of ecologically oriented fiction in the German language. In this novel, Bernhard examines the implications of a darkly ecological concept of the environment (as this article characterizes it with reference to Timothy Morton), confronting it with epistemological questions and placing it in the context of psychoanalysis
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Moving through places: Trauma and dislocation in Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Qiong He
In The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen presents the traumatic spatial experience of dislocation and homelessness of a number of characters centered around an upper-middle-class woman, Karen Michaelis, who defies the spatial confinement imposed by the dominant ideology regarding women in the interwar period, but ultimately becomes traumatized due to her failed quest for a place of identity, of belonging
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Crossing racial predicaments and reconstructing identity: The biopolitics of race in Edwidge Danticat's works Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Yi Cai
Focusing on The Farming of Bones, Brother, I'm Dying, and the short story “Night Talkers” collected in The Dew Breaker, this article explores how Edwidge Danticat engages with the biopolitics of race in her writing. The biopolitics of race traumatizes people through racial discrimination, exclusion, and purification; in Danticat's works, this is manifested in atrocities inflicted on Haitian workers
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Poetical thanatosonics—from vibrating bodies to documentary poems, based on Polish wartime verse Orbis Litterarum (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Dobrawa Lisak-Gębala
Bringing together the methodology of sound studies and literary criticism, this article examines multiple affordances of documentary poems that stage wartime sounds along with correlated somatic reactions and diverse modes of sonic affectivity. The conceptual tools are borrowed from the works of J. Martin Daughtry, who coined the term “thanatosonics” to render the unity of wartime violence and audial