Marion Gymnich - Böcker

This book is grounded in the belief that every nation had its own ‘Great War’, and that children’s picture books are an important barometer of each country’s national approach.To explore the depiction of the Great War in modern Australian, British, and French children’s picture books, where this historical event is reimagined in different ways as a futile conflict, as a painful victory, and as part of one country’s founding mythology, this book uses the concept of the hero’s journey as an underlying framework. It claims that this monomythic pattern, as developed by Joseph Campbell and modified by Christopher Vogler, not only informs all picture books selected for this project but can also be used to highlight the extent to which modern children’s picture book authors and illustrators conform to their respective nation’s cultural memory.It further maintains that the specific historical context of the Great War in these children’s picture books can be used to identify a variant of the hero’s journey: the ‘ordinary soldier’s journey’. This analysis of children’s picture books about the Great War through the lens of Campbell’s hero’s journey will be of interest to both students and researchers in the fields of children’s literature, literary theory, history, cultural studies, and education.

In the context of a systematic overview of the possibilities of applying narratological concepts to a study of TV series, ten case studies are explored in depth, demonstrating how series such as 24, Buffy, Twin Peaks, Star Trek, Blackadder, and Sex and the City make use of innovative audiovisual means of storytelling. Transgressing the traditional confines of narrative theory, the chapter authors address the question of how form, content, and function intersect in these series.

An examination of the terms used in specific historical contexts to refer to those people in a society who can be categorized as being in a position of ‘strong asymmetrical dependency’ (including slavery) provides insights into the social categories and distinctions that informed asymmetrical social interactions. In a similar vein, an analysis of historical narratives that either justify or challenge dependency is conducive to revealing how dependency may be embedded in (historical) discourses and ways of thinking. The eleven contributions in the volume approach these issues from various disciplinary vantage points, including theology, global history, Ottoman history, literary studies, and legal history. The authors address a wide range of different textual sources and historical contexts – from medieval Scandinavia and the Fatimid Empire to the history of abolition in Martinique and human rights violations in contemporary society. While the authors contribute innovative insights to ongoing discussions within their disciplines, the articles were also written with a view to the endeavor of furthering Dependency Studies as a transdisciplinary approach to the study of human societies past and present.

Given that strong asymmetrical dependencies have shaped human societies throughout history, this kind of social relation has also left its traces in many types of texts. Using written and oral narratives in attempts to reconstruct the history of asymmetrical dependency comes along with various methodological challenges, as the 15 articles in this interdisciplinary volume illustrate. They focus on a wide range of different (factual and fictional) text types, including inscriptions from Egyptian tombs, biblical stories, novels from antiquity, the Middle High German Rolandslied, Ottoman court records, captivity narratives, travelogues, the American gift book The Liberty Bell, and oral narratives by Caribbean Hindu women. Most of the texts discussed in this volume have so far received comparatively little attention in slavery and dependency studies. The volume thus also seeks to broaden the archive of texts that are deemed relevant in research on the histories of asymmetrical dependencies, bringing together perspectives from disciplines such as Egyptology, theology, literary studies, history, and anthropology.

War captivity is a prolific field of research for studies on strong asymmetrical dependency. The contributions in the present volume examine how POWs and civilian internees in different military conflicts, including the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, the two world wars, and the war in Bosnia, have been represented in visual sources. The images of war captivity addressed in the contributions are as heterogeneous as the contexts in which they were produced; they include allegorical representations and official press photographs, amateurish snapshots and propagandistic film recordings, self-drawn camp albums and comics commemorating war. What they have in common, however, is that they not only offer information about POWs and civilian internees but also interpret and emotionalise their experience. Visual sources may, for instance, document how POWs were treated in a particular camp, but they may also stress a certain amount of agency of the POWs; in addition, they may come to play a vital role in how the detaining power is remembered. Images provide evidence of atrocities and comparatively humane treatment alike – and thus may be relevant to the question whether reconciliation might seem possible in the long run.

Das Buch stellt Ursprungsmythen und Darstellungen von der Schaffung der Welt und der Menschheit aus verschiedenen Kulturen vor. Im Vordergrund stehen Südasien, China, Japan, Griechenland, das Zweistromland und die Amerikas. Neu ist, dass traditionelle Mythen moderner Literatur gegenübergestellt werden.

„Inklings" nannte sich eine Gruppe von Schriftstellern und Geisteswissenschaftlern in Oxford, deren bekannteste Mitglieder J.R.R. Tolkien und C.S. Lewis waren. Die Inklings-Gesellschaft e.V. widmet sich seit 1983 dem Studium und der Verbreitung der Werke dieser und ihnen nahestehender Autoren sowie der Analyse des Phantastischen in Literatur, Film und Kunst allgemein. Ihre Jahrestagungen werden in Jahrbüchern dokumentiert. Dieser Band enthält elf Vorträge der Tagung " Flora und Fauna in Fantastischen Welten", die 2019 in Bonn stattfand, sowie Rezensionen."Inklings" was the name of a group of Oxford scholars and writers; its best-known members were J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. The German Inklings-Gesellschaft, founded in 1983, is dedicated to the discussion and dissemination of the works of these authors and of writers commonly associated with them and to the study of the fantastic in literature, film and the arts in general. The proceedings of the annual Inklings conferences are published in yearbooks. This book contains eleven chapters presented as papers at the 2019 conference entitled "Flora and Fauna in Fantastic Worlds" and reviews.