Regensburger Arbeiten zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik / Regensburg Studies in British and American Languages and Cultures – serie

With its 1.5 million words BLUR is the biggest electronic corpus of nonstandard English. The present study describes the stages in the design, the compilation, and the editing of BLUR and attempts to gauge its linguistic profit. This is done both from a theoretical perspective – blues poetry vs. natural speech, representativeness, validity – and from an analytical perspective in particular qualitative, quantitative, and comparative analyses of morphological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic features. The findings indicate that BLUR provides an outstandingly rich and reliable documentation of the vernaculars spoken by African Americans between the Civil War and World War II. The more than 1,000 illustrative examples presented throughout this study attest to the correctness of this statement.

For many weeks, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 dominated the newspapers which covered the consequences with an unprecedented immediateness. This study looks at diverging representations of 9/11 in U.S. and German newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung) and explores effects on its possible readerships. The impact of the attacks, forms of heroism, the enactment of leadership, various demonstrations of patriotism and grief as well as the textual and visual presentation of the attacks are analyzed in detail. These intermedial representations reaffirm or contest U.S. American grand narratives. While the German newspapers tend to focus on information and analysis, the U.S. papers tend to strengthen shattered U.S. American identity constructions. The study is based on nearly 2,000 newspaper articles and documents the wide scope of topics prevalent in the post-9/11 newspaper coverage.

The era of the First World War represents one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in twentieth-century Irish history. The war is closely connected to the violent path to Irish independence from Britain and, for more than a century, it has brought the complexity of the issue of Irish identity into sharp focus. This study shows how the disparate literary responses of Irish authors to the war and its problematic legacy offer intriguing insights into different concepts of Irish identity, specifically those long buried within Irish national and historical consciousness. The late re-discovery of these identities in Irish writing reveals a modern nation trying to come to terms with its polarised past, seeking a more integrative sense of national self for the twenty-first century.

Exploring the nexus of American Studies and the Medical Humanities, this book examines the interdisciplinary interfaces between disease and American cultures and literatures. It traces the appropriation of yellow fever to legitimize the young nation and its embeddedness in discourses of race and gender from the late 18th until the end of the 19th century. Previously untapped textual and visual archives provide a heterogeneous base of canonical as well as previously disregarded works that are analyzed for yellow fever’s metaphorical and actual potential of risk and crisis. As a literary history of yellow fever epidemics, it firmly establishes the ideological, socio-political, visual, and cultural processing of the disease, which figures as invasive, inexplicable Other.Yellow Fever Years has received the Peter Lang Nachwuchspreis 2015.

This book is the first major sociophonetic work on the urban accent of Aberdeen in North-East Scotland. The study shows how the accent has changed following the large-scale immigration from other parts of Scotland and the UK since the 1970s. It is rooted in a dialect contact framework and based on sociolinguistic interviews with a stratified sample of 44 Aberdonians. The study uses an innovative method to assess the importance of the individual speaker in innovating and conserving the local accent. Based on six phonological variables, it shows how the traditional variants are replaced or marginalised, supraregional forms gain ground and strongly marked forms typical of Glaswegian or London English are added to the local feature pool.

Native American cultures have always succeeded to varying degrees in negotiating a balance between their tribal cultural heritage and the ‘dominant culture.’ In the present study, the meeting between these cultures is not interpreted as a clash, but as a cultural encounter in a contact zone. The concept of transculturation serves as a theoretical model to analyze how history and culture are fictionally constructed in contemporary American Indian literature. Developing a dynamic, dialogic, and reciprocal relationship between their native worldviews and literary techniques, on the one hand, and those of the larger society, on the other, the writers examined in this study – Anna Lee Walters, Diane Glancy, James Welch, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Gerald Vizenor – stress the processual nature of culture. These writers demonstrate that transculturation functions as a major strategy of survival for Native Americans in the past and in the present.