Renate von Bardeleben – författare

Before publishing Dreiser's European travel book in 1913, the Century Company editors had heavily excised autobiographical reminiscences, philosophical speculations, revealing portraits of prominent figures, Dreiser's relationships with women, and his carefully observed renditions of lower-class urban life. This newly edited text is based on the typescript that Dreiser himself had prepared from his holograph in order to preserve it fully for future publication. The text reveals Dreiser's multiple motives in going to Europe--not least the cultivation of his reputation in England and the exploration of his ancestral roots in Germany. The earlier edition is about places; this fuller text is about Dreiser himself.

Präsentation und Signifikanz der Stadt Prag im Erzählwerk von Cynthia Ozick und Philip Roth bilden das zentrale, bislang nicht erforschte Thema des Buches. Die Untersuchung verdeutlicht die Rolle der Stadt als Bindeglied zwischen Europa und den USA, als Vorbild (New Prague) und Gedächtnisort sowie ihr Wirkpotenzial in der amerikanischen Literatur.

Offering a thoroughly new approach to American literature, this book examines the literary representation of smell regarding its impact on establishing and subverting power structures. Although smell carries an enormous affective potential, it has been largely – but unjustly – overlooked in literary and cultural studies. Through her innovative close readings of works by authors such as Melville, Whitman, Equiano, Wilkins Freeman, Faulkner, Morrison, or Ellison, the author shows how smell stereotypes are used to discriminate against people and how odor references serve to undermine oppressive power structures. For this purpose, the author traces the cultural history of odor and combines insights from fields such as critical race, gender, intersectionality, trauma, and affect theories.

The border and border-crossing and its significance for the Chicana in a cultural, social, gendered, and spiritual sense are at the core of this book. The three oeuvres selected—Helena Viramontes’ The Moths and Other Stories, Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters, and Norma Cantú’s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera—are eloquent examples of feminist Chicana writers who refuse to allow their lives to be restricted by the gender, social, racial, and cultural border and who portray how Chicana women rebel against the unfair treatment they receive from their fathers, husbands and lovers. Crossing and deconstructing the man-made borders means to leave behind the known territory and discover an unknown land, in the hope of finding a new world in which Chicana women have the same rights as white women and in which they can realize their self, develop a new mestiza consciousness and liberate themselves from patriarchal constraints and religious beliefs. The author shows how the newly won self-confidence empowers the Chicana to explore the opportunities this freedom offers.

Die Untersuchung zeigt eine kontinuierliche Entwicklung von Traditionslinien weiblichen Schreibens in den USA von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Ära der New Woman auf. Diese Übergangsphase ist von Contending Forces bestimmt: Die Autorinnen bewegen sich in einem Spektrum zwischen subversiver Nutzung des weiblichen Literaturkonstrukts der Domestic Novel für proto-feministische Zwecke und Protest gegen die bestehenden Beschränkungen sowie Abkehr von herrschenden kulturellen und literarischen Werten und Mustern. Die Analyse der 17 behandelten Werke verdeutlicht die verschiedenen Formen der Loslösung von der Ideologie der Separate Spheres, bei der Identitätsbildungen aufgrund von Gender, Class und Race aufgebrochen werden. Die Ermächtigung, die Frauen aus dem moralisch überhöhten Bild der True Woman ableiten, zeigt sich vor allem in der weiblichen Reformliteratur, im fürsprechenden Schreiben für Unterschicht und ethnische Gruppen. Schwarze Autorinnen nutzen das weibliche Literaturkonstrukt, um für die afroamerikanische Emanzipation zu kämpfen, das Format konterkariert jedoch die politischen Ziele der Werke. Zu Ende dieser Herstory weiblichen Literaturschaffens befreien sich die Autorinnen von den Restriktionen der Frauenliteratur, verzichten aber damit auch auf ihre reformerische Autorität.

In this collection of essays, Americanists from the United States, Germany, and Latvia enter the scholarly debate about the ever increasing pluralization of societies on the North American continent by correlating the issues of multiculturalism and ethnic survival. Spanning six centuries and covering the cultural work and literary representation of eight ethnic groups in the USA and Canada, the essays demonstrate that the scope of the debate has to be widened to reflect the complexity of a subject which has too long been reduced to convenient but simplistic binaries.