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This volume of the Synergy Literature series focuses mainly on contemporary literary and cultural works in English. Authors of this book bring new perspectives on a wide range of literary works, as well as significant social movements and works of popular culture, with a focus mostly but not solely on novels, plays, and poetry. The book consists of 10 chapters, each covering various historical periods, literary works, and themes. While reading this book, readers will encounter analyses of works in the fantasy genre or the best-selling science fiction of recent years, or they will see reflections on feminism from the past to the present. In this regard, this book will be an important sourcebook for a broad scientific readership of graduate students and academics, regardless of the genre or period of literature in which they specialize.

This book attempts an innovative exploration of the connection between humour and scepticism in the English literary canon. Defining humour as a capability, or better put, as a dunamis, it looks into its'energeiac‘ forms of actualisation in the English literary imagination from Chaucer to Sterne. Refraining from attributing an essentialist tone and mode to the theoretical and critical reception of English humour, and also humour in a wider context, it works instead within a literary nominalist framework where it is explored as a literary phenomenon that sides with the living, the multifarious, and the experiential dimensions of human action. In doing so, it develops a broader argument concerning the nominalist overtones of English humour where its prominent scepticism purports an epistemological break with the dominant forces of universalism; an argumentative force which cyclically acquires its tenets from the preliminary discussion that focuses on the dynamicism of humour.

This volume sheds light on the nexus between knowledge and literature. Arranged historically, contributions address both popular and canonical English and US-American writing from the early modern period to the present. They focus on how historically specific texts engage with epistemological questions in relation to material and social forms as well as representation. The authors discuss literature as a culturally embedded form of knowledge production in its own right, which deploys narrative and poetic means of exploration to establish an independent and sometimes dissident archive. The worlds that imaginary texts project are shown to open up alternative perspectives to be reckoned with in the academic articulation and public discussion of issues in economics and the sciences, identity formation and wellbeing, legal rationale and political decision-making.

Dieses Buch beleuchtet das Motiv der Völlerei in der englischen Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit. Der Autor untersucht, wie die klassische Todsünde zur Beschreibung des Eigenen und Fremden genutzt wird, um durch Selbstüberhöhung und Fremdabwertung die nationale Identität zu stärken. Sein Analysemodell vereint Erkenntnisse aus der Systemtheorie mit zentralen Befunden der Nationenforschung. Dadurch kann er die Komplexität der englischen Gesellschaft abbilden und verschiedene Arten von Identität und Alterität herausarbeiten. Das Buch wirft einen detaillierten Blick auf Eliten, soziale Restriktionen, den Kampf gegen das Fremde und das Erwachen einer jungen Nation.