Christian Emden - Böcker

«This monograph makes an original and significant scholarly contribution, in addition to being a gripping read. Not only is it the first book in English to compare Russian and Czechoslovak literature and film of the interwar period in such a comprehensive way, but it does so via the growing discipline of the medical humanities. The book’s greatest strength is its attention to detail, exemplified by Sutton-Mattocks’s close readings of the medical implications of the creative works she selects.» (Melissa Miller, Modern Language Review 120.1, January 2025)«Her comparative approach using Czech and Russian work enriches the field by moving beyond national boundaries to show how interwar medical discourses were both locally specific and transnationally resonant. It also expands the scope of medical humanities beyond its usual Anglo-American and Western European focus, demonstrating the importance of Eastern European contributions.»(Dylan Mohr, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 1-2, 2025) Surgery, bacteriology, psychiatry … medicine fascinated writers and filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s. But why did medicine capture the creative imagination at precisely that moment, and what does the prevalence of medical imagery in works of the period tell us about interwar culture? These are the questions at the heart of this book, which takes the Russian and Czech literary and cinematic contexts as case studies for interrogating the wider phenomenon.Contributing to an emerging body of scholarship bringing the Medical Humanities and Slavonic Studies into dialogue, the book focuses on four particularly prevalent medical themes in the literature and cinema of the period: syphilis, nervous illness, surgery and childbirth. It offers new perspectives on works by well-known figures of interwar Russian and Czech culture (e.g. Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgenii Zamiatin, Gustav Machatý and Vladislav Vančura) as well as familiarizing readers with more obscure works by some of their lesser-known counterparts, such as Vladimír Raffel, Vikentii Veresaev, Nikolai Aseev and Noi Galkin.

Written in response to a brutal ethnic conflict that shocked Europeans in the 1990s, post-Yugoslav literature addresses issues that are still pertinent today. Looking at questions of language, gender, memory and identity, this book sheds new light on texts by three post-Yugoslav authors writing in German: Saša Stanišić, Marica Bodrožić and the lesser-known Austrian author Alma Hadžibeganović.Drawing on sources from history, sociology, feminist theory, trauma studies and linguistics, the author argues that post-Yugoslav texts use multilingual strategies to explore the complex interplay of linguistic, ethnic, gender and sexual difference in the former Yugoslavia and to interrogate the monolingual paradigm dominant in Western Europe. She shows that post-Yugoslav literature – written in German and born out of spatial and linguistic dislocation – can open up new imaginary possibilities and point to transnational bonds that counter the acute sense of loss and speechlessness induced by trauma. The proposal for this book was the Winner of the 2018 Women in German Studies Book Prize.

The relationship between different media has emerged as one of the most important areas of research in contemporary cultural and literary studies. But how should we conceive of the relationship between texts and images today? Should we speak of collaboration, interaction or competition? What is the role of literary, historical and scientific texts in a culture dominated by the visual? What is the status of images as cultural artefacts? Are images forms of representation, do they simulate reality or do they intervene in the material world? And how do literature and cultural theory – themselves essentially textual discourses – react to the much-discussed visual turn within Western culture? Does the concept of ‘intermediality’ allow literary, historical and cultural scholars to envisage a more general theory of media? Addressing these questions from a programmatic point of view, the articles in this volume investigate the effects of different forms of representation in modern European and American literature, media and thought.