Marcus Hartner - Böcker

The Narratologia series publishes state-of-the-art monographs and collective volumes devoted to modern narrative theory and its historical reconstruction in all the philological disciplines. It is the first narratological forum of its kind in Germany. In addition to literary texts, the series focuses on narration in everyday contexts, in pictorial media, in film and in the new media as well as on narration in historiography, ethnology, medicine, and the law.The series publishes in German and English. All volumes are peer reviewed by two anonymous assessors.

The theory of Blending, or Conceptual Integration, proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Marc Turner, is one of most promising cognitive theories of meaning production. It has been successfully applied to the analysis of poetic discourse and micro-textual elements, such as metaphor. Prose narrative has so far received significantly less attention. The present volume aims to remedy this situation. Following an introductory discussion of the connections between narrative and the processes of blending, the contributions demonstrate the range of applications of the theory to the study of narrative. They cover issues such as time and space, literary character and perspective, genre, story levels, and fictional minds; some chapters show how such phenomena as metalepsis, counterfactual narration, intermediality, extended metaphors, and suspense can be fruitfully studied from the vantage point of Conceptual Integration. Working within a theoretical framework situated at the intersection of narratology and the cognitive sciences, the book provides both fresh readings for individual literary and film narratives and new impulses for post-classical narratology.

Interdisciplinarity has gained increasing prominence as a general guiding principle for innovative research over the past decades. However, few works have attempted to provide a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon from the specific vantage point of literary and cultural studies.The handbook aims to fill this lacuna. It explores interdisciplinarity in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural scholarship and provides a guide to key debates on (current) forms, theories, and practices of interdisciplinarity. Beyond central systematic questions, the handbook pays special attention to the actual disciplines that engage in forms of cross-disciplinary exchange. It portrays established as well as emerging fields of interdisciplinary collaboration and responds to the substantial acceleration of the differentiation within single academic disciplines and subjects illustrated by the emergence of an increasing number of ‘turns’ (e.g. the cultural, ethical, spatial turn) and ‘studies’ (e.g. environmental studies, sensory studies, disability studies etc.). It tackles current research challenges ranging from pandemics to climate change, thus, not only presenting an overview, but a timely intervention in interdisciplinary research.

Comparisons not only prove fundamental in the epistemological foundation of modernity (Foucault, Luhmann), but they fulfil a central function in social life and the production of art. Taking a cue from the Practice Turn in sociology, the contributors are investigating the role of comparative practices in the formation of eighteenth-century literature and culture. The book conceives of social practices of comparing as being entrenched in networks of circulation of bodies, artefacts, discourses, and ideas, and aims to investigate how such practices ordered and changed British literature and culture during the long eighteenth century.