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Professur für Neuere Englische Literaturwissenschaft

Projects & Collaborations

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Anglo-Swiss Travel Accounts in the Early Modern Period

PhD Project  | 1 Project Members

This dissertation focuses on Anglo-Swiss travel accounts between 1600 and 1780. Being a neglected field in research, the project aims to uncover and examine both Swiss travellers in Great Britain and British travellers in Switzerland by compiling archival and printed sources as well as studying them in detail. The dual angle of my study will focus on insights into reciprocity, points of negotiations and exchange that offer a mutual understanding of travellers in the respective countries, rather than just focusing on travellers from just one country. The fundamental question at the heart of the project is how these texts change our understanding of cultural exchange, negotiation, and travel in the period between 1600–1780. How did writing and travel conventions change and stereotypes evolve? How big is the intertextual influence on travel texts as well as experiences and how are their reflections of the ‘Other’ influenced by themselves and why.

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the project, digital methods play a key role in compiling and analysing the materials, making them accessible to the public, and experimenting with innovative ways of approaching and presenting the texts. The SwissBritNet’s database will offer a platform to present and make the materials available for researchers as well as the public. Along with the database, selected stories will give a deeper insight into certain texts or people.

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SwissBritNet: Swiss-British cultural exchange and knowledge networks 1600-1780

Research Project  | 3 Project Members

The SwissBritNet project proposes to make a substantial corpus of 17th- and 18th-century documents available in a user-friendly database which will allow students, scholars and a wider audience to investigate Swiss-British relations in the early modern period and so deepen our understanding of early modern networks of knowledge. The study of early modern transnational relations in Europe has been advanced in recent years by digital humanities initiatives enabling the large-scale collection, visualisation and analysis of data designed to improve our knowledge of the Republic of Letters. Joining this international research community, we will highlight the nature and relevance of Swiss-British relations. While both continental anglophilia and the British enthusiasm for Switzerland are often seen as late-18th-century phenomena, we will show that they have a long and intricate history. These exchanges are hidden in thousands of unpublished manuscripts and obscure print items which need to be digitised, transcribed and made searchable online. SwissBritNet will contribute to a more complete picture of the early modern Republic of Letters by making Swiss-British relations and exchanges visible in context. Building on existing database projects and sharing data with the well-established hallerNet platform, we will develop advanced search options, visualisation tools and linked data solutions. Innovative search options will permit complex network analysis, and case studies will ensure that data is modelled with well-considered research questions in mind. SwissBritNet will offer fully edited and searchable texts of 1300-plus hitherto unpublished documents from Swiss and British libraries and the metadata for thousands more print and manuscript items, innovative linked-data solutions which enable collaborations with existing databases and visualisations for search results such as maps, graphs, timelines and 3-D animations. The SwissBritNet database will enable complex inquiries into the networked structure of the Republic of Letters by providing an interoperable, multi-modal database that connects to and shares data with other platforms. Representative case studies based on the corpus will be published in open access monographs and articles. Publications and outreach activities including conferences, an exhibition and transnational stories on the SwissBritNet website will disseminate findings to the academic community and a wider public. For data access longevity, compatibility will be ensured with the DaSCH platform. We are committed to an open access policy and sustainability according to the FAIR principles so that data and software will be freely and reliably accessible to the scientific community.

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PhD Thomas Manson; Remapping the Outmoded in Rural England, 1870-1995

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and his surrealist-inspired theory of the outmoded, this dissertation project re-reads rural England from 1870-1995 through the works of five authors - Thomas Hardy, Mary Butts, John Cowper Powys, Ithell Colquhoun and W.G. Sebald - whom Manson proposes as central participants in a previously unrecognized tradition of rural modernity. The project examines how these writers stage encounters between outmoded forms (objects, figures, rituals) and modernity which create new spatio-temporal assemblages, refiguring the rural as a dialectical space where outmoded forms are recuperable in combatting capitalist encroachment upon rural landscapes. Utilizing a theoretical approach more usually applied to urban settings, the project asks how Benjamin's urban-focussed conception of the outmoded may be read to incorporate the rural; and how the encounters between the outmoded and modernity staged by these authors provide a means of mobilizing the rural at the intersection of capitalism, globalization and rural traditions. The project employs a methodology that investigates both the formal and narrative strategies deployed by these authors, as well as examining how literature is able to represent performance forms such as folk drama and ritual. Through this methodology, which Manson terms literature as performance , the project aims to show not just how these texts utilize the outmoded as a narrative device, but also how the outmoded becomes a formal part of their expression, realizing Benjamin's radical model of historicity as performance. In doing so, these writers forge new ways of framing the rural, not as a nostalgic pastoral retreat, but as a repository of history that is of equal importance in the formulation of modernity as the metropolitan city.

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Sensing Crisis – Writing Towards the Nonhuman in Contemporary Ecopoetry

PhD Project  | 2 Project Members

This Ph.D. thesis adds to a vibrant conversation in contemporary literary studies about the challenging nature of ecopoetry in the twenty-first century. With the introduction of the term 'Anthropocene' into the environmental discourse, attention has turned to the ongoing exploitative and destructive domination of the human over the nonhuman. As a result, contemporary poets confront the human-centred perspective on the nonhuman world that has prevailed post-industrialised Western literature. The unease in projecting human feelings, emotions, or expectations onto nonhuman representation challenges them to scrutinise the literary potential of poetic voice and form beyond the human in their work. By looking at a broad variety of texts by British and Irish poets, such as, Jen Hadfield, Kathleen Jamie, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O'Reilly, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott this Ph.D. project investigates how contemporary poetry reacts to the modern changes in the environment. Next to questioning the legitimacy of their own poetic voice to write about the nonhuman world, their works sound out the representation of anthropomorphic voices as well as human-nonhuman entanglements and ecological forms to rethink nonhuman agency. By applying new materialist, ecofeminist, and posthuman theories, my thesis aims to explore the poetic possibilities of shaping an empathetic dialogue with the nonhuman world.

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Mapping a Sense of Humor - Space and Narrative in Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

Since the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings , fantasy fiction authors have used not only literary tales to build intricate secondary worlds, but also maps and lore from classic and contemporary fantasy that pay increased attention to spatial levels of narrative. Acclaimed British writer Sir Terry Pratchett exhibited a critical awareness of such conscious world-making. In his Discworld series of novels, he created both a parody of fantasy akin to Tolkien and a genuine secondary world in its own right. Going beyond mere commercialized mockery to add a seemingly paradoxical twist, Pratchett's Discworld constantly reminds readers of its fictionality, providing not merely tongue-in-cheek humor but an assessment of storytelling itself. Focusing on the dichotomies between fiction and reality, between the representation of good and evil in fantasy and beyond, this project explores the intrinsic mechanisms at work in Pratchett's secondary world. It offers new perspectives on the self-reflective nature of the Discworld novels that underline the importance- and the challenges as well as pitfalls- of creative imagination for the stories and spaces of fantasy along with narratives in general.

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Vice, Scandal, and "News": 19th-Century Newspapers and their Literary Products

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

My project emerges from within the context of the repeal of the taxes on knowledge (i.e. the removal of additional taxes for advertisements (1853), stamps (1855), and the weight of paper (1861)), honing in on the changing nature of the periodical from 1850 onwards, and the way in which 19 th -century serialized fiction in Britain refracted and reflected the political agendas of the monthly, weekly, and daily papers that housed them. Moving chronologically through Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White , Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , A. C. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and Bram Stoker's Dracula , I explore the influence of newspaper and magazine layouts, the authors' knowledge and exploitation of readership and circulation, the organization of the news, and the way in which authors incorporate current events and/or 'front page news' in their writing, demonstrating that serialization increasingly became a mode of narration and a form of logic.

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Literary Depictions of Germany in Contemporary British Fiction

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

This PhD project is concerned with contemporary (mostly Post-Wall) British literary discourses of Germany and its culture. It analyses what literary discourses project onto an area that was once known as 'enemy territory' and examines why and how Germany is used as a setting. By choosing a geo-centered approach, in which the site determines the corpus, I hope to discover patterns in British literary discourses of Germany that appear to be specific to that particular place. As first-hand memory of wartime Germany is diminishing, we are experiencing a shift from communicative to a more institutionalised cultural memory which affects the discourses. It seems that this time distance to World War Two has reawakened writers' interest in Germany as a setting and has produced more narratives that move away from themes directly associated with war. A preliminary research phase has unveiled that quantum physics, psychoanalysis and homosexuality are prevalent recurring themes in the British literary discourses of Germany. These themes are now to be examined more closely and in relation to each other. In order to discuss the characteristics of Germany as a setting in British literary discourses, they will also be analysed in connection to their literary space and will be set in context with British cultural memory of Germany and its culture.