Muse: Munich Studies in English – serie

Predicated upon the opposition of writing back and reading forward, the author challenges some of the established concerns or preoccupations of the field. Postcolonial theory, framed by several binary assumptions, e.g. the dichotomy of coloniser/colonised, perpetrator/victim, powerful/powerless, has frequently led to a partial vision regarding postcolonial subjects as well as literatures. By submitting six selected novels from India, South Africa and the Caribbean to contrastive readings, the book maps out the scope of literary interpretation, also and in particular in a postcolonial context. More than simply providing a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of each text, this study challenges both the benefits and limits of the postcolonial as a critical theoretical approach.

Drawing on Bernd Mahr’s model theory, this volume introduces a new approach to Romanticism in contemporary Australian literature. Focusing on two very different authors, David Malouf and the Indigenous poet Samuel Wagan Watson, this book highlights their similarities rather than their differences. It is the first book-length study dedicated specifically to each author’s poetic oeuvre. Comprehensive readings reveal that an ironic dialectic underpins how each poet writes from within a disjunct of culture and environment following colonisation, finding hope in dialogue and a productive process of negative assertion. The theoretical framing of Romanticism developed here effectively rehabilitates Romanticism as a productive paradigm in contemporary Australian poetry.

This is an edited collection of essays drawn from collaborative events organized jointly by The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. The book focuses on how literary and cultural perspectives from different humanities academic environs in Asia and Europe might contribute to our understanding of the "transferability of concepts." Exploring ways in which these traditions may enter into new and productive collaborations, the book presents readings of a wide range of Western and Eastern writers, including Shakespeare, J.M. Coetzee, Yu Dafu. The book contains a virtual round table followed by four thematic sections – "Travels and Storytelling," "Translation and Transferability," "Historical Contexts and Transferability," and "Aesthetic Contexts and Transferability."

English verbs of speaking have been affected by profound and intriguing changes, in particular between Old and Middle English. These changes crucially involve the loss of the verb cweþan and its replacement by say, which remains the most common verb of speaking to this day. The present study provides an exhaustive corpus-based, cross-period, and multi-dimensional appraisal of verbs of speaking used as part of the linguistic expression of communication in the history of English situated within a frame-semantic and constructionist framework. Moreover, it elucidates the fascinating changes affecting the verbs used to talk about communication between Old and Middle English. Also, this study sheds light on the functions of medially placed reporting clauses emerging in the Middle English period.

In Present-Day English, the only flexible sentence constituent in unmarkeddeclarative sentences is the adverbial, which can often be placed in initial, medial, or end position. This book presents the first empirical and corpus-based study on the usage patterns and functions of medially-placed linking adverbials in conceptually-written academic English. By combining quantitative with detailed qualitative analyses of selected corpus examples, the present study explores whether the placement of linking adverbials in medial position can be regarded as a focusing strategy, similar to focusing adverbs and cleft sentences. Moreover, it investigates whether different medial positions are associated with distinct discourse functions, such as the marking of contrastive topics or differentfocus meanings.

Australia’s official Reconciliation project confronted Australians with the continuous violent dispossession suffered by the country’s Indigenous peoples and the pressing need to offer a public apology to them. While trauma became a tool whereby to create paths of empathy and reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, it was also a manipulative strategy to deny the country’s shameful history. This book examines Gail Jones’s literary contribution to such debates. It examines Gail Jones’s questioning of Australia’s victimology narratives, and offers an insightful discussion of the transmedia, transnational and multidirectional approach to trauma in the reconciliation-related novels she published during John Howard’s vexed Liberal Government (1996-2007).

This Dictionary is the first etymological dictionary of English imitative (onomato-poeic, mimetic) words. Imitative words (e.g. crash, bang, achoo) are words with iconic correlation between form and meaning, iconicity being a relationship of resemblance. The dictionary provides extensive information on English words of imitative origin and uncovers patterns in their diachronic development. Each entry of the altogether 1320 dictionary entries includes data on pronunciation, part of speech, source of sound, type of imitated sound, iconic word class, date of first attestation, frequency of use, origin, etymology, degree of form-meaning correspondence (stage of de-iconization), as well as a brief account of form and meaning changes. The entries also illustrate the modern usage by typical examples of the word in a sentence (the data were extracted from contemporary dictionaries and corpora of the English language) and references to relevant etymological dictionaries which confirm their imitative status.