Norbert Lennartz

This book features a collection of essays, shedding subversively new light on Romanticism and its canon of big-six, white, male Romantics by focusing on marginalised, forgotten and lost writers and their long-neglected works. Probing the realms of literary and cultural lostness, this book identifies different strata of oblivion and shows how densely the net of contacts and rivalries was woven around the ostensibly monolithic stars of the Romantic age. It reveals how the lost poets inspired the production of anthologised poetry, that they served as indispensable muses, sidekicks and interlocutors of the big six and that their relevance for the literary scene has been continuously underrated. This is also surprisingly true for some creators of famous one-hit wonders (Frankenstein, The Vampyre) who were suddenly rocketed to fame or notoriety, but could not help seeing their other works of fiction turning into abortive flops.

Forgotten Poets, Neglected Works and One-Hit Wonders

The Lost Romantics

Jonas Nesselhauf

Pornographie ist längst ein allgegenwärtiges Phänomen der Alltags- und Populärkultur: Darstellungen von Sexualitäten und dem sexuellen Körper (das Suffix ›-graphie‹ weist auf diesen abbildenden und inszenierenden Charakter hin) durch Sprache, Zeichen und Bilder finden sich bereits zu jeder Zeit und in jeder Kultur, seit dem 20. Jahrhundert dann aber natürlich vor allem in Fotographie und Film. Hierbei haben sich über die Jahrhunderte in Europa mal dezidierte Schreibstrategien herausgebildet, um der Zensur zu entkommen, mal Darstellungskonventionen eines ›männlichen Blicks‹ etabliert – Ästhetiken der Pornographie, die sich auf einem engen Grat zwischen der ›kunstvollen‹ Erotik und dem ›verruchten‹ Obszönen bewegen. Mit Beiträgen von Tatiana Ageeva, Hans Richard Brittnacher, Philip Jacobi, Katharina Kohm, Norbert Lennartz, Christian Lenz, Swantje van Mark, Jonas Nesselhauf, Wieland Schwanebeck und Sabine Sielke.

Darstellungen von Sexualitäten im Medienvergleich

Ästhetik(en) der Pornographie

Taking in works from writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, this book spans approximately 300 years and unpacks how bodily liquidity, porosity and petrification recur as a pattern and underlie the chequered history of the body and genders in literature. Lennartz examines the precarious relationship between porosity and its opposite – closure, containment and stoniness – and explores literary history as a meandering narrative in which 'female' porosity and 'manly' stoniness clash, showing how different societies and epochs respond to and engage with bodily porosity. This book considers the ways that this relationship is constantly renegotiated and where effusive and 'feminine' genres, such as 'sloppy' letters and streams of consciousness, are pitted against stony and astringent forms of masculinity, like epitaphs, sonnets and the Bildungsroman.

Niobe’s Siblings

Tears, Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages

Explores Byron as the figurehead of Romanticism and the writer of provocatively 'marginal' texts This book approaches Byron from a completely new angle: no longer seen in terms of his status as a celebrity and a star on the book-selling market, Byron is instead seen as an outsider both in Regency society and, even more so, for his iconoclastic views of life and literature. Pilgrims in pursuit of non-existing shrines, women as man-eating giants and viragos, cannibalism, suicide, black humour and other provocatively border-crossing topics leave scholars hopelessly at a loss as to where they should categorise Byron and what they should do with his penchant for marginal themes, genres and characters. Byron caters to numerous Romantic clichés (weltschmerz, melancholy, subjectivity), while simultaneously reverting to genres, themes and motifs that cast him as a pre- or even anti-Romantic. This collection will trigger new debates in Byron scholarship and show that terms such as canonicity and marginality tend to be blurry and stand in constant need of re-negotiation. Key Features: Re-reads Byron's heterogeneous texts Foregrounds Byron's marginal texts, the margins from which they were written and the thematic marginalities they deal with Re-evalutates Romanticism in the light of marginality Pinpoints the interface between Classicism, Romanticism and Modernity

Byron and Marginality

Dieter Koch

While Dickens used to be seen as a writer of shallow and sentimental children’s literature, as the prolific caterer to the new market of mass literature, this collection of essays shows that Dickens was not only a reader of high-brow literature, but also expected his readers to understand them in the context of contemporary scientific and economic debates. Covering a wide range of writers – from Sidney, Shakespeare, Cervantes to Swift, Smollett and Bulwer-Lytton – Dickens’s novels reveal a multi-layered cosmos and supply their readers with richly woven nets of intertextuality.

Dickens as a Reader

Texts, Contexts and Intertextuality

Marion Gymnich

Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today’s media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death. In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine. It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.

Norbert Lennartz

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