Representations & Reflections Series

Frances Hodgson Burnett published numerous works for an adult readership, but she is mainly remembered today for three novels written for children: Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911). This volume is dedicated to The Secret Garden. The articles address a wide range of issues, including the representation of the garden in Burnett's novel in the context of cultural history; the relationship between the concept of nature and female identity; the idea of therapeutic places; the notion of redemptive children in The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy; the concept of male identity; constructions of 'Otherness' and the redefinition of Englishness; film and anime versions of Burnett's classic; Noel Streatfeild's The Painted Garden as a rewriting of The Secret Garden; attitudes towards food in children's classics and Burnett's novel in the context of Edwardian girlhood fiction and the tradition of the female novel of development.

Originally a concern primarily of social studies and economics, poverty has emerged as a significant thematic focus and analytical tool in literary and cultural studies in the last two decades. The "new poverty studies" are dedicated to analyzing representations of poverty and the poor in literature and the visual arts, in the news media and in social practices. They aim at exploring the frameworks of representation that impact the affective and ethical responses of audiences to disenfranchised groups such as the poor. The contributions to this volume focus on representations of poverty in the Anglophone postcolonial world, exploring, for example, contemporary discourses on poverty in the UK, filmic representations of Nairobi slums or the agency of the poor in literature from India.

Der dem klassischen Schauerroman zugrunde liegende Diskurs von »Selbst« und »Anderem« wurde schnell auf die Gegebenheiten der kolonialen Situation angewandt und auf das Verhältnis zwischen Kolonialherr und kolonialem Subjekt projiziert. Zeitgenössische schwarzaustralische Künstler nehmen sich dieses kolonialen Schauerdiskurses an, reißen ihn durch ihre scharfe Perspektive in Stücke und transformieren ihn schließlich zu einem Diskurs des »Aboriginal Gothic«.Die vorliegende Studie erarbeitet die theoretischen Grundlagen des »Aboriginal Gothic« und benutzt den so konkretisierten Begriff, um Romane von Vivienne Cleven, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Sam Watson und Alexis Wright sowie Filme von Beck Cole und Tracey Moffatt zu analysieren. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht dabei die Frage, inwieweit der traditionell europäische Schauerdiskurs mit Elementen indigener australischer Kultur durch- bzw. zersetzt ist, um die aktuelle Situation australischer Aborigines darzustellen und eine wiedererlangte kulturelle Identität zu beschreiben.

Located on the seam of Diaspora and Israeli Literature, Anglophone Israeli Literature comprises a loose community of 100-500 authors and has co-existed with the Hebrew writing tradition in Israel since the 1970s. Consisting mainly of immigrants from Anglophone countries, Anglophone Israeli Literature is characterized by a search for personal and poetic identity in a highly transcultural environment, challenging settled identities and opting instead for flexibility, flux and inclusion. The present volume considers Anglophone Israeli Literature as a phenomenon in its critical, social and historical aspects on the one hand and explores the specific mechanisms of constructing and representing poetic identity on the other hand. Focusing on the works by and interviews with some of the core representatives of Anglophone Israeli Literature – Shirley Kaufman, Rachel Tzvia Back, Karen Alkalay-Gut, Lami, Richard Sherwin, Jerome Mandel, Riva Rubin and Rochelle Mass – the book analyzes three pivotal elements of identity: language, geography and place, and political and emotional self-positioning towards the Other.

Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been adapted, transformed and translated into numerous languages. Thus the classic today constitutes an international, transcultural, transmedial and iconic phenomenon of pop culture that transcends genre boundaries as easily as centuries. The vitality of the book at the crossroads of the literary canon and pop culture is analysed by contributions focusing on its translations, Bollywood adaptations, iconic TV versions or vlog adaptations, on erotic rewritings or generic transformations into Chick-Lit, crime fiction or the Gothic mode, on teaching contexts or on a diachronic analysis of its illustrations. Complemented by a compilation of student essays, this volume affirms and celebrates Pride and Prejudice being perhaps more alive than ever before.

Fear in its many facets appears to constitute an intriguing and compelling subject matter for writers and screenwriters alike. The contributions address fictional representations and explorations of fear in different genres and different periods of literary and cultural history. The topics include representations of political violence and political fear in English Renaissance culture and literature; dramatic representations of fear and anxiety in English Romanticism; the dramatic monologue as an expression of fears in Victorian society; cultural constructions of fear and empathy in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Jonathan Nasaw's Fear Itself (2003); facets of children's fears in twentieth- and twenty-first-century stream-of-consciousness fiction; the representation of fear in war movies; the cultural function of horror film remakes; the expulsion of fear in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and fear and nostalgia in Mohsin Hamid's post-9/11 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

Childhood in neo-Victorian fiction for both child and adult readers is an extremely multifaceted and fascinating field. This book argues that neo-Victorian fiction projects multiple, competing visions of childhood and suggests that they can be analysed by means of a typology, the 'childhood scale', which provides different categories along the lines of power relations, and literary possible-worlds theory. The usefulness of both is exemplified by detailed discussions of Philippa Pearce's "Tom's Midnight Garden" (1958), Eva Ibbotson's "Journey to the River Sea" (2001), Sarah Waters' "Fingersmith" (2002) and Dianne Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale" (2006).

Basierend auf der Annahme, dass Geschlechterrollen in den letzten Jahrzehnten zunehmend komplexer und differenzierter geworden sind, wird in den Artikeln des Bandes die Konstruktion von Geschlecht in zeitgenössischen Medienprodukten analysiert. Die AutorInnen geben Einblicke in die vielfältigen medien- und genrespezifischen Umsetzungen der Konstruktion, Perpetuierung und Infragestellung von Geschlechterkonzeptionen in audiovisuellen Medien. Dabei betrachten sie das Zusammenspiel der verschiedenen Ebenen, in denen das »gendering« in diesen Medien angesiedelt ist, und nehmen einem zentralen Ansatz des Bandes folgend eine transmediale Perspektive ein.Das Buch soll durch eingehende Analysen populärer Beispiele aus TV-Serien, Filmen und Musikvideos den Blick der LeserInnen schärfen, wie audiovisuelle Medien auf der einen Seite das Bild von »Weiblichkeit« und »Männlichkeit« beeinflussen und auf der anderen Seite gesellschaftlich verankerte Geschlechternormen reproduzieren.

Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death.In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine.It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.