Comfort in Contemporary Culture – The Challenges of a Concept

Dorothee Birke is associate professor of English literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Her main research interests include political drama, digital book culture, and the history of the novel. She has held research fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Stella Butter is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Campus Landau). In her research, she is especially interested in representations of home in contemporary Anglophone literature, contingency and literature, and the cultural functions of the British novel in the process of modernisation.