Greta Olson Knihy

Reading Eating Disorders uses literary texts as a key to open the door of American culture. Novels and poems on disordered eating reveal America’s bulimic relationship to food and the tendency to punish individuals – particularly women and the poor – for not being slender. These texts partake of the confessional ethos in American public culture – the need to testify to and hear about intimate physical details. Tracing the history of eating disorders and Western culture’s idealization of thinness with reference to canonical literary works such as Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1859) and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8), the author illustrates anorexia, bulimia, and the binge-eating disorder using contemporary accounts of these disorders. A cultural studies approach to literature is taken to describe how writings on eating disorders reveal the political and economic world out of which they are written.

Current Trends in Narratology offers an overview of cutting-edge approaches to theories of storytelling. The introduction details how new emphases on cognitive processing, non-prose and multimedia narratives, and interdisciplinary approaches to narratology have altered how narration, narrative, and narrativity are understood. The volume also introduces a third post-classical direction of research ‑ comparative narratology ‑ and describes how developments in Germany, Israel, and France may be compared with Anglophone research. Leading international scholars including Monika Fludernik, Richard Gerrig, Ansgar Nünning, John Pier, Brian Richardson, Alan Palmer, and Werner Wolf describe not only their newest research but also how this work dovetails with larger narratological developments.

This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.

Criminals as Animals from Shakespeare to Lombroso demonstrates how animal metaphors have been used to denigrate persons identified as criminal in literature, law, and science. Its three-part history traces the popularization of the 'criminal beast' metaphor in late sixteenth-century England, the troubling of the trope during the long eighteenth century, and the late nineteenth-century discovery of criminal atavism. With chapters on rogue pamphlets, Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Defoe and Swift, Godwin, Dickens, and Lombroso, the book illustrates how ideologically inscribed metaphors foster transfers between law, penal practices, and literature. Criminals as Animals concludes that criminal-animal metaphors continue to negatively influence the treatment of prisoners, suspected terrorists, and the poor even today.

New Theories, Models and Methods in Literary and Cultural Studies provides compact insights into advances in literary and cultural theory. Each essay illustrates the practical application of recent theoretical innovations, offering students a reliable overview of innovative approaches that can enhance their research. The volume is organized into four sections. The first discusses the nature of theory, featuring essays that challenge its practicality from the perspective of a literary author (Ulrich Horstmann) and describe it as a smorgasbord for practitioners (Herbert Grabes). The second part highlights the enduring contributions of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (Ute Berns), and their relevance to Media Ecology (Ingo Berensmeyer) and Performance Studies (Anneka Esch-van Kan). The third section explores methodologies rooted in political concerns, including Queer Theory (Nadyne Stritzke), Ecocriticism (Sonja Frenzel), and Critical Media Studies (Greta Olson). The final section focuses on theoretical developments that align with critical and social practices, featuring chapters on literary studies as a life science (Ansgar Nünning and Michael Basseler) and translation as a critical practice (Doris Bachmann-Medick). This volume serves as a valuable resource for those engaged in literary and cultural studies.