Volume 13: Betsy van Schlun / Science and the Imagination

Betsy van Schlun: Science and the Imagination: Mesmerism, Media and the Mind in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature

Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture Vol. 13

Cloth - 22 x 14.5 cm - Upcoming

Volume 12: Magical Objects: Things and Beyond

Magical Objects: Things and Beyond

Elmar Schenkel and Stefan Welz (eds)

Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture Vol. 12 - 2006 - (forthcoming)

The collection of articles brought together in this volume is the result of an international conference under the title ”Magical Objects – Degrees of Objectiveness in English Literature (1880-1930)” which was held at the English Department of Leipzig University. Situated within the given time span around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, most of the articles focus on this paradigmatic transitional phase in which tendencies of regaining objectiveness competed with respective counter-tendencies of its dissolution in different fields of life. It goes almost without saying that a plumbing into the depths of the 19th and early 20th century worlds of things, their transitions and their disintegrations reveals many a parallel to our contemporary world with its virtual extensions. The implicit ubiquitous comparison shows that an increasing distance from objects, an ever widening abstraction, and the dissolution of objectiveness into relationships, together with other moments, precede and still inform our new global reality. In going beyond mere literary texts and the given time span, this volume attempts to trace and to encourage the tracing of such interactions and paradigms. It follows up from the intentions of previous volumes of the series Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture on literature, technology and science in the period of 1700-1999 and on alchemy. The volume is meant as another link forged between literature/culture and the sciences.

Contributors:

• M. E. Warlick: Magic, Alchemy and Surrealist Objects
• Elmar Schenkel: Brainspotting: Brains as Magical Objects
• Christoph Houswitschka: "You could not injure me": The Powers of Maugham’s
  and Moore’s Modern Magicians
• Paul Goetsch: Uncanny Collectors and Collections in Late-Victorian Fiction
• Oliver Lindner: Far North: The North Pole as a Magical Object in late 19th Century Culture and Literature
• Silke Strickrodt: The Phonograph in the Jungle: Magic and Modernity in the African Encounter with the Talking Machines
• Alexandra Lembert: "Thoughts are Things": Magical Objects, Objective Magic and Sax Rohmer’s The Dream-Detective (1920)
• Stefan Welz: Virginia Woolf’s Solid Objects
• Gabriele Rippl: The Ecphrastic Poet as Custodian of Culture — Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy
• Hilary P. Dannenberg: Windows, Doorways and Portals in
  Narrative Fiction and Media

Volume 11: Dietmar Böhnke / Shades of Gray

Dietmar Böhnke: Shades of Gray: Science Fiction, History and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Work of Alasdair Gray

Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture Vol. 11

ISBN 3-931397-54-8 and 1-931255-18-0 - 316p. - Cloth - 22 x 14.5 cm - April 2004 - EUR 72

This study proposes a fresh approach to the work of one of Scotland’s foremost contemporary writers. Concentrating on the major novels Lanark (1981), Poor Things (1992) and A History Maker (1994) but also making use of most of Gray’s other writings as well as interviews with the author, the book takes the three fields of science fiction, history and postmodernism as its points of reference. While the first two have arguably been underrepresented in research on Gray’s ouvre to the present, the latter has mostly been used in either uncritical celebration or total condemnation (not least by Gray himself). Here, a more balanced perspective is attempted which pays tribute to the undoubtedly ‘postmodern’ elements in the novels as well as highlighting the problems and complications this approach implies, especially with reference to Gray’s ethical and political convictions. Another aim of the study is to allow the literary work to stand as an equal beside theoretical views on literature and culture and engage in a fruitful debate with them, rather than being subjected to their ‘critical gaze’ alone. What emerges from the investigation of the texts are colourful ‘shades of Gray’ that speak urgently for the importance and relevance of difference and ambiguity, while at the same time being underpinned by Gray’s strong humanist, democratic-socialist and nationalist views. This, it is suggested, is a valid contribution to the theoretical debates on postmodernism, and the place of literature and culture in the modern world more generally.
After a personal prologue and introduction, the study starts with a critical discussion of the highly problematic concept of ‘postmodernism’, followed by a brief investigation of ‘postmodern’ elements in Gray’s work. It then concentrates in its two central chapters on the three novels in the context of the science fiction category and the question of history, always situating the discussion in the wider cultural debates of the present. In a last step, the findings of this part are used to problematise Gray’s position within the concept of postmodernism. After a more general conclusion, the book ends with an epilogue that gives the word to Alasdair Gray himself, by printing relevant passages from two letters written by him to the author of this study.

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Volume 4: The Golden Egg: Alchemy in Art and Literature

The Golden Egg: Alchemy in Art and Literature

Alexandra Lembert and Elmar Schenkel (eds)

Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture Vol. 4

ISBN 3-931397-40-8 and 1-931255-10-5 - 231p. - Cloth - 22 x 14.5 cm - April 2002 - EUR 56

Science, technology and literature have become an important field of study since it is only now, in the age of computers and genetics, that we have begun to see the fundamental implications resulting from the interaction between scientific thought, imagination, rhetoric and ideology. This volume presents the proceedings of an international conference on literature, science and technology held in 1998 at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Contributors from Britain, Eastern Europe and Germany cover a whole range of important themes, writers and scientists throughout the last three centuries, among them: Natural Science and Western Art; Margaret Cavendish; Jane Webb Loudon and her Tale of the Twenty-Second Century; Poe and Phrenology; Hallucination; Vision and Invisibility in the Victorian Age; Natural History from H.W. Bates to A.S. Byatt; Industrial Novel and Scientific Romance; Kipling and Technology; Wells on the Moon; Chesterton and the Two Cultures; Pound and Energy; Postcolonial Literature and the Magus; Stephen Jay Gould's Stories; Rushdie's New Physics. This book is not only a reassessment of literary and scientific constellations in discourse but also an exploration into unknown territories and lost worlds which, paradoxically, seem to have an uncanny resemblance to our possible futures.

Contributors:

• Helmut Gebelein: Alchemy and Chemistry in the Work of Goethe: Lecture with Experiment
• Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly: Saxony, Alchemy and Dr. Faustus
• Betsy van Schlun: William Godwin's St Leon and the Fatal Legacy of Alchemy
• Anne Hegerfeld/Dirk Vanderbeke: The Terrestrial Humours of an All-Shemical Son: Alchemy and the Linguistic Transformation of Finnegans Wake
• Liliana Sikorska: Alchemy as Writing--Alchemy and Writing: A Study of Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding
• Alexandra Lembert: The Eternal Return of the Same? A Comparison between Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee and Gustav Meyrink's Der Golem and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster
• Norbert Schaffeld: "a wonderous feat of alchemy": A Post-Jungian Reading of Ann-Marie MacDonald's Play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
• Robert Stockhammer: Rosicrucian Readioactivity: Alchemy around 1900
• Elmar Schenkel: H. G. Wells: Alchemy and Information
• M. E. Warlick: An Itinerant Alchemist: Max Ernst in Europe and America
• M. E. Warlick: Moon Sisters: Women and Alchemical Imagery
• Finn Tiedel: Stundmen of Eternity--Chinese Alchemists and Literature
  
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Volume 3: Dietmar Böhnke / Kelman Writes Back

Dietmar Böhnke: Kelman Writes Back. Literary Politics in the Work of a Scottish Writer

Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture Vol. 3

ISBN 3-931397-21-1 - 108p. -Colth - 22 x 14,5 cm October 1999. DM 68,00

During the past few years, Scotland has enjoyed an astonishing comeback on the political scene of the UK and is now in the course of setting up its own parliament, so that already hopes – and fears – are raised for a Scottish future separate from the rest of Britain. Observers of Scottish literary developments, however, will neither be very much surprised at the new self-confidence nor will they be too afraid of parochial-nationalist prospects. This is because in Scottish literature (and, arguably, culture in general) a revival or even ‘new Renaissance’ has been discernible for at least two decades, which is characterised by a strong concern for Scottish national identity as well as a markedly international outlook.
This study looks at one of the principal and most controversial Scottish authors of the present, Booker Prize winner James Kelman, and investigates his fiction against this background. Although he is not commonly seen to propagate Scottish national identity, his ‘Scottishness’ is found to consist in his place in a Scottish literary tradition of this century that reaches from the first literary Renaissance of the interwar years through the tradition of the Glasgow novel to the present revival. Furthermore, Kelman’s strong political concerns for the (Glasgow) underclass and the dispossessed in general, reflected in his characters, his use of language and even in his narrative techniques, make him the spokesman for this “vital part of the nation’s heart”. However, the Scottish or national elements in his writings are always inextricably linked to a broader, international context, ranging from his feeling of solidarity with postcolonial writers from all over the world to his international literary ‘relations’ and the depiction of the universal condition of urban alienation in his novels and short stories.
The work of James Kelman can therefore be seen as exemplary for how positive literary ‘nationalism’ joins hands with internationalism. With this, he once again stands in a positive tradition of twentieth-century Scottish literature, as exemplified by the works of Hugh MacDiarmid or Neil Gunn, but also of Kelman’s contemporary Alasdair Gray. Thus, if literature is anything to go by, Scotland’s future does looks promising.

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Volume 2: Lost Worlds and Mad Elephants

Lost Worlds and Mad Elephants: Literature, Science and Technology 1700-1990

Elmar Schenkel and Stefan Welz (eds)

Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture Vol. 2

ISBN 3-931397-16-5 - 372p. - Cloth - 22 x 14.5 cm - February 1999 - DM 118.00 / $ 69.80

Read a review.

Science, technology and literature have become an important field of study since it is only now, in the age of computers and genetics, that we have begun to see the fundamental implications resulting from the interaction between scientific thought, imagination, rhetoric and ideology. This volume presents the proceedings of an international conference on literature, science and technology held in 1998 at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Contributors from Britain, Eastern Europe and Germany cover a whole range of important themes, writers and scientists throughout the last three centuries, among them: Natural Science and Western Art; Margaret Cavendish; Jane Webb Loudon and her Tale of the Twenty-Second Century; Poe and Phrenology; Hallucination; Vision and Invisibility in the Victorian Age; Natural History from H.W. Bates to A.S. Byatt; Industrial Novel and Scientific Romance; Kipling and Technology; Wells on the Moon; Chesterton and the Two Cultures; Pound and Energy; Postcolonial Literature and the Magus; Stephen Jay Gould's Stories; Rushdie's New Physics. This book is not only a reassessment of literary and scientific constellations in discourse but also an exploration into unknown territories and lost worlds which, paradoxically, seem to have an uncanny resemblance to our possible futures.

Contributors:

• Barbara Korte: Natural Science and Western Art: A Bibliographical Mapping
• Richard Nate: “Poetical Cabbalas and Philosophical Worlds”: Science and Literature in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World
• Silke Strickrodt: On Mummies, Balloons and Moving Houses: Jane (Webb) Loudon’s The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
• Hermann Josef Schnackertz: Of Bumps and Brains: E.A. Poe and Phrenology
• Kate Flint: Hallucination and Vision
• Hans Ulrich Seeber: Ants and Analogy in Natural History. Henry William Bates’ The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863) and Antonia S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1992)
• Elmar Schenkel: Invisibility: Strategies of Encounter
• Eckart Voigts-Virchow: Melancholy Elephants and Virgin Machines: Technological Imagery and Mechanical Lacunae from Industrial Novels to Scientific Romances
• Stefan Welz: Scientific Views from Exotic Outposts. Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad on Technology
• John S. Partington: The First Men in the Moon and the ‘Corporative State’
  Maria & Elena Kozyreva: H.G. Wells and A.K. Tolstoy
• Vera Shamina: H.G. Wells and Mikhail Bulgakov: Aspects of Reception in The Island of Dr. Moreau, “Rock’s Eggs”, and “The Dog’s Heart”
• Christoph Houswitschka: Chesterton and the Two Cultures
• Christine Fingas: “God Inside the Stone”: On the Radiance of Physical, Psychical and Mystical Energies in Pound
• Tobias Döring: Scales and Ladders: Natural History and Map Media in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder
• Stipe Grgas: Flann O’Brien’s Joyful Science
• Thomas Kühn: Television Viruses in Contemporary English Novels
• Michael Mitchell: The Fallible Magus: Reflections of Faustus in the Image of the Engineer in Athol Fugard, David Dabydeen and Wilson Harris
• Klaus Peter Müller: Constructionism in the Sciences, in Literature and in Literary Theory
• Jürgen Meyer: GUT and QED, and Other “P2C2E”: “Processes Too Complicated to Explain” and Rushdie’s New Physics
• Dirk Vanderbeke: Wheels of Fortune or Vicious Circles The (R)evolutionary Stories of Stephen Jay Gould
  
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Volume 1: Silke Strickrodt / Those Wild Scenes

Silke Strickrodt: Those Wild Scenes - Africa in the Travel Writings of Sarah Lee (1791-1856)

Leipzig Explorations in Literature and Culture Vol. 1

ISBN 3-931397-09-2 - 121 p. - Illus. - Cloth - October 1998 - DM 98.00 / $ 55.00

Sarah Lee (1791-1856) was one of the first European women to travel to West Africa and write about her experiences there. Known to many only as the wife of T.E. Bowdich, the 'famous African explorer', she lived on the Gold Coast for more than eighteen months, visited the Gabon, and then studied Arabic Literature and natural history in Paris. Her second African journey, as well as her career as a naturalist, ended abruptly with the death of her husband on the African coast. Widowed and penniless, Sarah Lee turned to writing stories, novels and popular natural history books to maintain herself and her family. More than twenty books and numerous stories were published, many of which drew upon her great knowledge of natural history and her African experiences.
Concentrating on her travel writings, this study examines how Sarah Lee's experiences of Africa were reflected in her works, discussing the various influences that shaped her portrayal of the continent. Particular attention is paid to the social and moral restrictions which she faced as a female traveller and writer in her times.

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Preface

The books in this series suggest that we live in an exciting age of explorations. We now have the great opportunity to chart the territories between disciplines and cultures, to map forgotten or as yet undiscovered areas of thought, culture and writing. The monographs and collections from Leipzig try to break out of unproductive oppositions say between East and West, North and South, humanities and sciences, or academic discourse and journalism. Instead we are encouraging the emergence of triangular constellations, such as between Newfoundland, Scotland and West Africa, or between travelogue, science and women’s writing, or between alchemy, prehistory and bicycles. Pioneer studies on contemporary authors will be another asset of this series. The focus of Leipzig Explorations is on literatures in English, albeit with a strong emphasis on comparative and interdisciplinary studies. We particularly encourage essayistic writing that combines academic knowledge with passion and curiosity.