Studia Imagologica - Böcker

The articulation of collective identity by means of a stereotyped repertoire of exclusionary characterizations of Self and Other is one of the longest-standing literary traditions in Europe and as such has become part of a global modernity. Recently, this discourse of Othering and national stereotyping has gained fresh political virulence as a result of the rise of “Identity Politics”. What is more, this newly politicized self/other discourse has affected Europe itself as that continent has been weathering a series of economic and political crises in recent years. The present volume traces the conjunction between cultural and literary traditions and contemporary ideologies during the crisis of European multilateralism.Contributors: Aelita Ambrulevičiūtė, Jürgen Barkhoff, Stefan Berger, Zrinka Blažević, Daniel Carey, Ana María Fraile, Wulf Kansteiner, Joep Leerssen, Hercules Millas, Zenonas Norkus, Aidan O’Malley, Raúl Sánchez Prieto, Karel Šima, Luc Van Doorslaer,Ruth Wodak

In “The Turk” in the Czech Imagination (1870s-1923), Jitka Malečková describes Czechs’ views of the Turks in the last half century of the existence of the Ottoman Empire and how they were influenced by ideas and trends in other countries, including the European fascination with the Orient, images of “the Turk,” contemporary scholarship, and racial theories. The Czechs were not free from colonial ambitions either, as their attitude to Bosnia-Herzegovina demonstrates, but their viewpoint was different from that found in imperial states and among the peoples who had experienced Ottoman rule. The book convincingly shows that the Czechs mainly viewed the Turks through the lenses of nationalism and Pan-Slavism – in solidarity with the Slavs fighting against Ottoman rule.

With this volume, the editors Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco propose an extension of the traditional conception of imagology as a theory and method for studying the cultural construction and literary representation of national, usually European characters. Consisting of an instructive introduction and 21 articles, the book relates this sub-field of comparative literature to contemporary political developments and enriches it with new interdisciplinary, transnational, intersectional, and intermedial perspectives.The contributions offer [1] a reconsideration and update of the field’s methods, genres, and theoretical frames; [2] trans-/post-national, migratory, and marginalized perspectives beyond the European nation-state; [3] insights into geopolitical dichotomies such as Orient/Occident; [4] intersectional approaches considering the entanglements of national images with notions of age, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race; [5] investigations of the role of national images in visual narratives and music.

This literary analysis of the representation of ‘Gypsies’ in juvenile literature is unique in its comparative scope, as well as in the special attention to rare pre-1850 narratives, the period in which juvenile literature developed as a specific genre. Most studies on the subject are about one national literary tradition or confined to a limited period. In this study Dutch, English, French and German texts are analysed and discussed with reference to main academic publications on the subject. Emphasis is on the rich variation in narrative presentations, rather than on an inventory of images or prejudices. An important topic is the fundamental difference between early English and German narratives. Important because of the wide dissemination of German stories.

In the long nineteenth century, dominant stereotypes presented people of the Mediterranean South as particularly passionate and unruly, therefore incapable of adapting to the moral and political duties imposed by European civilization and modernity. This book studies, for the first time in comparative perspective, the gender dimension of a process that legitimised internal hierarchies between North and South in the continent. It also analyses how this phenomenon was responded to from Spain and Italy, pointing to the similarities and differences between both countries. Drawing on travel narratives, satires, philosophical works, novels, plays, operas, and paintings, it shows how this transnational process affected, in changing historical contexts, the ways in which nation, gender, and modernity were imagined and mutually articulated.

Beyond the Mulatta: Haunted Hybridity in Advertising will chronicle and analyze black and mixed-race women's trajectory in postcolonial visual culture history. In contemporary western advertising, there is a frequently recurring stock figure of a particular type of black woman. This figure is a of African descent, with a light to medium skin tone and a loosely curled Afro. She is an engine of middle-class aspiration and an avatar of "a better future" that is close at hand, but will never happen.

The pervading theme of this book is the construction and allocation of identity, especially through images and imagery. The essays analyse how the dominant social discourses and imageries construct identity or assign subject positions in relation to the categories of race, nation, region, gender and language. The volume is designed to inform the study of those categories in cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy and history. Its coverage is geographically global, multidisciplinary, and theoretically eclectic, but also accessible. The authors include both established and rising scholars from historical, literary, media, gender and cultural studies. This innovative collection will appeal to all those who are interested in the mechanisms of constructing and evolving personal and group identities, in past and present.

This interdisciplinary volume seeks to examine and explore the various issues surrounding image construction, identity making and representations of the North, as well as the interconnectedness between those issues. The aim is to elucidate the multiple aspects of the idea of the North, both as a mythological space and a discursive system created and shaped by cultures outside the North as well as from within.The objective of the research project Iceland and Images of the North is to elucidate several aspects of images of the North and to explore their functions in the present, focusing especially on Iceland. What effect have Iceland and its people had on images of the North, and how do those images influence the Icelanders and other nations? The project will be a cooperative, interdisciplinary undertaking by researchers in the humanities and social sciences.

The book examines the discursive construction of the representation of “Europe” in the selected writings of leading Serbian writers and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to being of particular significance in the process of the genesis of our understanding of Europe across the continent, these several decades were crucial for the discursive construction of “Europe” in Serbian culture: when after the end of the Cold War the debate on Europe became possible again, it was on a discursive level to a large extent determined by the stockpile of images and ideas created between the world wars. The book seeks to answer the following questions: who constructed “Europe”, and with what authority? For whom were these constructions intended? How was this representation validated? What purposes was it meant to serve? Which issues were raised in comparing “Europe” with Serbia, and why? Which textual traditions were the elements of this construction borrowed from? How did the construction of the European other define Serbian self-representation? This volume is of interest for all those working in Slavic or East European studies - especially cultural, intellectual and political history of the Balkans - imagology, and European studies.

How is the life-altering event of migration narrated for children, especially if it was caused by Anti-Semitism and poverty? What of the country of origin is remembered and what is forgotten, and what of the target country when the migration is imagined there a century later? Looking Forward, Looking Back examines today’s representation of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe to America around the turn of the last century. It explores the collective story that emerges when American authors look back at this exodus from an Eastern European home to a new one to be established in America. Focusing on children’s literature, it investigates a wide range of texts including young adult literature as well as picture books and hence sheds light on the dynamics of the verbal and the visual in generating images of the self and other, the familiar and the strange.This book is of interest to scholars in the field of imagology, children’s literature, cultural studies, American studies, Slavic studies, and Jewish studies.

Has thinking, working and teaching in terms of national literatures become obsolete in today’s globalized world of hyphenated languages, literatures and cultures? Since the rise of modern European national philologies coincided with the emergence of modern European nation-states, does the dissolution of the latter in the European supranational unity imply the suspension of the former? Or we must, on the contrary, consider the fact that today’s Europe is not only postnational but, in its re-nationalized East-Central-European part, post-multinational as well, i.e., emerging out of the breakdown of the postimperial state formations such as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia?