Aus unseren Neuerwerbungen – Anglistik 2024.2

Rid­dles and Won­ders: Defin­ing Human­i­ty in Anglo-Sax­on Eng­land
Through­out the his­to­ry of human civ­i­liza­tion, the def­i­n­i­tion of the ani­mal and its rela­tion­ship to humans have been con­tentious issues. This book inves­ti­gates the notion of what con­sti­tut­ed an ani­mal in Ear­ly Medieval Eng­lish cul­ture as well as how the ani­mal-human inter­ac­tion is por­trayed in the Anglo-Sax­on lit­er­ary cor­pus. In this regard, the animal’s por­tray­als in the Exeter Book Rid­dles and of mon­strous crea­tures in the Won­ders of the East pro­vid­ed a fer­tile field for research because these texts, rarely con­nect­ed to alle­gor­i­cal read­ings and offer­ing view­points that might be seen as com­ple­men­tary, deal with fun­da­men­tal issues regard­ing what it meant to be human for Ear­ly Medieval Eng­lish soci­ety.
This study offers fresh insights into the char­ac­ters and themes explored in the Exeter Book col­lec­tion and in the Won­ders of the East, look­ing for the spaces of Anglo-Sax­on thought in which ani­mal­i­ty and human­i­ty appear to meet. The author not only dis­cov­ers the pecu­liar fea­tures in the def­i­n­i­tion of human­i­ty with regard to ani­mal and non-human fig­ures, but is able to demon­strate that a strong anthro­pocen­tric voca­tion can coex­ist with an out­look that rec­og­nizes a close affin­i­ty among dif­fer­ent species.
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Brexlit: British lit­er­a­ture and the Euro­pean project
Britain’s vote to leave the Euro­pean Union in the sum­mer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writ­ers had long been explor­ing anx­i­eties and frac­tures in British soci­ety – from Euroscep­ti­cism, to immi­gra­tion, to devo­lu­tion, to post-truth nar­ra­tives – that came to the fore in the Brex­it cam­paign and its after­math.
Read­ing these ten­sions back into con­tem­po­rary British writ­ing, Kris­t­ian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliv­er the first in-depth study of how writ­ers engaged with these issues before and after the ref­er­en­dum result. Exam­in­ing the work of over a hun­dred British authors, includ­ing Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishig­uro, and Ali Smith, as well as pop­u­lar fic­tion by Andrew Marr and Stan­ley John­son, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brex­it fic­tion is begin­ning to emerge.
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