Eva-Maria Windberger - Böcker

The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels combines the investigation of David Mitchell’s novels with the introduction of a new critical concept to literary studies: empowerment. Aiming to situate and establish empowerment firmly within the context of literary studies, it offers the first framework and definition for reading fictional texts with the lens of empowerment and applies it in the analysis of discourse, the fictional characters, and the role of the reader in Mitchell’s novels. Drawing on narratological analysis, cognitive approaches to literature, and reader-response theory, it features close readings of Cloud Atlas (2004), Black Swan Green (2006), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and dissects the author’s strategies, poetics, and agenda of empowering fiction. This book argues for an inherent, indissoluble connection between empowerment and the telling of stories and demonstrates how literary studies can benefit from a serious engagement with empowerment—and how such an engagement can stimulate new responses to fiction and put literary studies in conversation with other disciplines.

The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels combines the investigation of David Mitchell’s novels with the introduction of a new critical concept to literary studies: empowerment. Aiming to situate and establish empowerment firmly within the context of literary studies, it offers the first framework and definition for reading fictional texts with the lens of empowerment and applies it in the analysis of discourse, the fictional characters, and the role of the reader in Mitchell’s novels. Drawing on narratological analysis, cognitive approaches to literature, and reader-response theory, it features close readings of Cloud Atlas (2004), Black Swan Green (2006), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) and dissects the author’s strategies, poetics, and agenda of empowering fiction. This book argues for an inherent, indissoluble connection between empowerment and the telling of stories and demonstrates how literary studies can benefit from a serious engagement with empowerment—and how such an engagement can stimulate new responses to fiction and put literary studies in conversation with other disciplines.

This interdisciplinary volume situates British Chinese cultures and identities at the centre of contemporary discourses that negotiate the complex entanglements between diasporic communities and belongings, migration and transculturality, representation and plurality. The six parts of this book focus on British Chinese agency, voices, and cultural production, shedding light on resistance to racist ‘othering’ and the complexities of self-definition. At their core, the chapters discuss notions of transnationalism, immigration, and national identity, British Chinese Christianity, the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic, (in)visibility and representation, mediations of cultural identity in community magazines as well as literary renditions of (post-)migrant British Chinese identities. Bringing together contributions from fields as diverse as history, sociology, theology, heritage studies, cultural and literary studies, this volume aims to diversify the understanding of what it means to be ‘British Chinese’ and extends existing conversations in and beyond British Chinese studies into the 2020s.

This volume centres exchange as an analytical tool to conceive of Anglo-East Asian entanglements in literature, culture, and media from the eighteenth century until today. In its capacity to host diverse experiences, representations, and mediations, exchange enables the discussion of productive, reciprocal, often contested cross-cultural intersections, transfers, and flows, which may initiate long-term processes of hybridisation and transculturality. At its heart, this volume explores how transcultural exchanges have shaped the formation and self-perception of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ identities and how these processes have been constructed, complicated, and negotiated in fiction, travel writing, philosophical and economic texts, theatre, film, music, manga, multi-media installations, and exhibitions. In our examination of Anglo-East Asian exchanges, we illustrate that the lines between binary oppositions are blurry at best; the manifold types of exchanges considered here offer inroads into a deeper understanding of the separating as well as uniting factors between East Asia and the anglosphere.