Contemporary Literature – serie

Maybe you'll be glad Uncle Will wasn't your best friend, but you will be glad you've read about Uncle Will and his exploits. We're talking about someone whose funeral was attended by people who mostly just wanted to make sure he was dead: Even the preacher couldn't cook up a decent eulogy! Oh, Uncle Will was a character, all right. His specialties: lyin', cheatin', gamblin', drinkin', and good livin'. And, in his own way, lovin'. The Devil and Uncle Will immortalizes many of the unforgettable adventures and stories Harold Miles heard from Uncle Will himself. Written with a special fondness for the old reprobate, The Devil and Uncle Will brings to life an extraordinary character-someone who actually claimed he'd made a pact with the devil. Latter-day Faust, good-ol'-boy gone bad-that's Uncle Will. Harold Miles' style is lively, poignant, captivating. He knew and loved-and often found it hard to love-Uncle Will. Heck, he's kinfolk. But though there's an underlying deep seriousness in The Devil and Uncle Will, it's also an extremely funny book-southern humor at its best. You'll laugh out loud, smile, maybe even shed a tear or two.But, whatever your emotions, you won't want to put this book down!

In the genre of horror, elderly people are often used as a trope to evoke both a fear of death and a fear of aging. Old age is therefore equated with bodily, mental, or social decline. The contributors of this book investigate what exactly we are afraid of when we posit old age as a source of horror. The aim is to harness the thrills and pleasures of horror to think about how quality of life can be improved in old age and how elderly people can be better integrated in our ever fearful and suspicious societies.

We live in a critical moment in history, often called the »Anthropocene«, that is defined by unprecedented scales of uncertainty. Natalie Dederichs draws on insights from the new materialisms about the entangled nature of planetary existence and combines them with approaches to aesthetics from fields as diverse as reader-response criticism, phenomenology, Gothic and media studies. She introduces a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality as a necessary component of any ecological engagement with fiction that fully embraces literary encounters with the inaccessible and elusive as expressed in uncanny atmospheric reading experiences.

As a literary genre, the nonfictional reportage has particular implications for the role of the writer. Pascal Sigg shows how six U.S. American writers, including David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, reflect on themselves as human media in their reportage. The writers assert themselves in a postmodern way by scrutinizing their own mediation. As it also traces and develops the theorization of reportage as genre along the reporters' early concerns with technical media, this pioneering contribution to literary journalism studies paves a way for a new materialist approach in the under-researched field.