Austrian Studies in English – serie

The essays collected in this book provide profound insights into the wide-ranging topic of the fashionable queen: the manifold implications and effects that the combination of body, power and gender can have are examined by using different approaches and a variety of theoretical frameworks. By addressing queenly appearances in the past and the present, in politics and the media, in royalty and the middle-classes, in the arts and in popular culture, this book offers a new way of thinking of publically significant women, who exert, and at the same time subvert, their power through their attires and thereby negotiate notions of gender, class, power and media representation.

The book presents contributions to the 2012 conference of the Austrian Association of University Teachers of English in which scholars of various fields of English Studies discuss aspects of contact and conflict in Anglophone literatures, critical theory, cultural studies, interdisciplinary and comparative English studies and English linguistics. The papers reflect current research in these areas and show that disciplinary classifications are no longer as rigid as they used to be: Topics are as widely spread as linguistic variation, Māori English, English as a lingua franca, intergenerational conflict, hip hop discourse, literature and the creative arts, science drama, childhood in crime fiction, and the crisis of «high art».

This volume seeks to put drama and its neglected mental dimension into the limelight. While narrative fiction with its intricate ways of rendering consciousness has been deemed an ideal playground for approaches of a cognitivist leaning, the dramatic genre has been all but ignored by cognitive literary studies. Providing insights into such drama-related issues as subject construction, interiority, performativity, empathy, reader manipulation and reception control, the contributions to this collection testify to the richness and variety of the cognitivist enterprise.

Attempts to approach the topic of drink and literature and the question of how far this is interconnected with the habits of the writers can be considered within the wider frame of what is called drinking studies. This is an interdisciplinary field which is a composite of numerous facets, the common denominator being the analysis of how drink has functioned and functions in the lives of individuals and communities, taking into consideration diverse contexts, perspectives and backgrounds connected with alcohol consumption (or abuse). Among numerous examinations within the field of drinking studies, the province of literary criticism offers interesting insights. Any critical debate in this respect inevitably focuses on two areas, the first one being the study of literature per se; the other encompasses the writers’ lives and the extent to which their drinking affects their writing. Thus, the perspective can be critical, biographical, or both, reflecting what is often referred to as life-writing, or self-writing. In some instances, one might even risk calling it inspirational writing, and in these cases, one needs to debate the question of how alcohol as a source of inspiration – or ‘booze as a muse’ – is perceived.