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Copyright of Journal for Central European German Studies / Zeitschrift für Mitteleuropäische Germanistik is the property of Praesens Verlag and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Lendemains is the property of Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co.KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the Czech appropriation of the literary genre splatterpunk, political correctness, or more precisely the lack of it, occupies a prominent place. Fascination with so-called ‘incorrectness’ can be understood to be a special case of what Richard Burt identifes as ‘the fetish of censorship’ with writers drawing from the appeal of such ‘forbidden’ topics as racial and gender stereotypes. Tis paper examines the ways in which the criticism of correctness plays out in diferent forms of paratexts, such as ads, reviews, and interviews with writers. Te analysis of Czech splatterpunk novels and short stories reveals what is actually understood as ‘incorrect’ in terms of literary fction, and how those texts, featuring primarily white masculine heroes with indestructible bodies, lend themselves to diferent kinds of readings: from sharp political satire to self-refective spectacular grotesque.

In the period of 1989-2020 Lithuanian literature experienced a very dynamic literary development. The aim of the article is to highlight specifics of the new cycle and to analyze the prose trends of each decade of regained independence. The author discusses the literary process more synchronically than diachronically. The first period, i.e. the transition from the Soviet regime to the new system, was especially outstanding as the censorship was eliminated, the previously banned works of deportees and resisters were legalized, the postwar émigré writers returned back to culture and opportunities for innovation opened up. The role of writer as a cultural hero diminished. Former writers loyal to the Soviet regime described this situation as crisis, while the younger generation developed postmodernist way of writing. Many works were based on the cultural and historical memory reckoning with the Soviet era. All genres underwent certain transformations, such as emergence of peculiar essay genre, spread of ego-documentaries, revival of short stories, and flourishing popular literature. Serious changes took place after 2004 when Lithuania joined the European Union, which led to economic emigration and encouraged changes in mentality and expanse of local contexts. Mobile, “transit” type of Lithuanian character emerged who changed his place of residence but felt lonely in the global world. This is a huge innovation, bearing in mind the sedentary agrarian Lithuanian culture and the confines of the iron curtain during the Soviet era. Increased quantity of published books decreased their quality.

A partire dalla Grecia arcaica gli enigmi e gli indovinelli trovano la loro collocazione ideale nell’istituto del simposio. In epoche più recenti si sviluppano teorie e classificazioni ad opera dei retori. Oggi possediamo un buon numero di indovinelli antichi e anche diverse testimonianze che, malgrado il più delle volte sembrino indirizzarci verso un’idea dell’enigma legata al gioco e alla sfida tra due o più contendenti, restano tuttavia saldamente ancorate alla tradizione artistica e letteraria da cui dipendono. Questo studio è finalizzato a comprendere se e in che misura dalle testimonianze antiche si possano ricavare tracce di veri e propri contesti agonali al di fuori dello spazio letterario dei Greci e dei Romani. Starting from archaic Greece, enigmas and riddles find their ideal place in the symposium. In more recent times ancient theories and classifications were developed by rhetoricians. Today we have a good number of ancient riddles and also numerous testimonies. Although the latter often seem to lead us towards an idea of the enigma linked to the game and the challenge between two or more contenders, they remain firmly anchored in the artistic and literary tradition on which they depend. This study is aimed at understanding whether, and to what extent, from ancient evidence we can derive traces of real agonal contexts outside the literary space of the Greeks and Romans.

Contrairement à la France, à la Grande-Bretagne ou aux États-Unis, la modernité massmédiatique ne s’épanouit en Hongrie qu’au début du XXe siècle. On peut considérer la période de 1840 à 1920 comme une première phase, l’âge d’or étant la période qui dure de 1920 à 1945. Cette première phase (1840-1920) se caractérise par son plurilinguisme, dont nous montrons les conséquences. A cause de la situation complexe des ethnies et des confessions, de l’interaction entre assimilation et modernisation, on ne peut pas adopter les conceptions occidentales de la bourgeoisie ou de la culture de masse-médiatique. A cause de cette situation multilinguistique et multiethnique le chercheur doit être plus attentif aux processus de résistance des minorités, tant linguistiques qu’ethniques. Ce sont ces aspects que nous nous attachons à étudier ici.

If, in popular culture, what matters are the architextual dynamics and their formulation in the cultural and media series, then the question of the international circulation of imaginations and their globalization must be thought of on a broader level, by articulating the level of the text and that of its material context, because it is this context, as much as the text, which produces meaning. This is illustrated by the example of the arrival of novel dime in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, which imposed in a few years everywhere kinds of stories and specific formats. Indeed, if these American series have upset European imaginations, it is less because of the themes of the detective and the cowboy than by the structural rupture brought about by the arrival of the format of the dime novel, leading to new modes of reading and new relationships to text. Even in European spaces more on the margins of globalization movements, where the distribution of these publications has remained limited, often experienced later, and absorbed by older logics, these phenomena were nevertheless perceived as the expression a major cultural mutation, associated with the commodification and industrialization of literature, contributing, in these spaces, also to the globalization of imaginations.

In the present study we propose a look at Zsolna Ugron’s works from a generic perspective in order to analyze what conventions of genres such as the romance, the epistolary novel and the historical romance the author has revived and what are the elements that she has added or changed in order to make them appealing to the public and yield to critical analysis. We also attempt an investigation of the formation of female subjectivity as illustrated by these fundamentally feminine novels, given that all four of them operate with female protagonists, women in the process of shaping their destinies, often at crossroads where - despite all the external factors that seem to determine their fate from history to social conventions and men around them - ultimately they make their own personal choices and position themselves as responsible, active and creative subjects.

The optimal conditions for the creation of a popular novel occurred in the 19th century. With the influence, first of all, of French literature, there was in Spain a huge production of these works, known in Spanish as ‘folletines’ or folletín novel. Its importance for the study of literature is undeniable. It is possible to detect its legacy in the best Spanish novel between 1870 and 1936, for instance in Benito Pérez Galdós or Pío Baroja. But it is also interesting to compare this folletín novel with the modern best-seller. Similar techniques and conception of what should be a novel are to find in modern bestseller Spanish writers such as Carlos Zafón, Eduardo Mendoza or Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In this article, they are compared with the famous ‘folletinistas’ of the second half of the 19th century: Manuel Fernández y González, Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco, Ramón Ortega y Frías, etc.

The anthology Myths of Megapolis (Mify megapolisa), published in 2007, due to the variety of the presented short stories shows various perspectives of the metropolis’ life and the fears of its citizens. The article discusses and classifies these fears and analyses their connection with the substance of the metropolis itself.

There exists a sociocultural function to humour that is geared towards maintaining order through a subversion (or inversion) of the more serious, structured status quo, and while there is a pragmatic side to the dispensation of humour across any given society, humour can also serve a fundamentally ontological function in determining and representing a group’s identity. Though notions of social organization and culture exist and are perpetuated primarily within a group’s literary canon, as espoused for example in the privileging of genres such as the epic or the novel as loci of national identity, this paper argues that such identities can be just as effectively – if not better – constructed through popular representations in humour, especially in satirical content found in “ephemeral” mediums such as comic strips. Such representations in turn can be mobilized to complement or even dismantle the status quo and offer alternative paradigms of understanding national identities and cultural affiliations.

Marina Fiorato’s The Glassblower of Murano (2008) tells the story of Eleonora, a young woman who travels to Venice in search of her genealogical past and existential roots. Coming from London, Eleonora incarnates a “modern” outlook on what she assumes to be the timeless life and culture of Venice. At one point in the novel, admiring the old houses on the Canal Grande, Eleonora is “on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they look the same now as in the Renaissance” (2008, 15). This discourse of pure origins and unbroken continuities is a fascinating fantasizing on characteristics that extend from the urban territory to the people who inhabit it. Within narratives centred on this notion, Italian culture, perceived as holding a privileged relation with history and the past, is often contrasted with the displacement and rootlessness that seem to characterize the modern places and people of England and North America. Through a discussion of two Anglo-American popular novels set in Italy, and several relocation narratives, this paper proposes an exploration of the notion according to which history is the force cementing the identities of societies perceived as less modern and frozen in a timeless dimension. From a point in time when the dialectics of history have been allegedly transcended, Anglo-American popular narratives observe Italy as a timeless, pre-modern other.

One of the main episodes of the Sīrat ʿAntar is the one where ʿAntar decides to hang his muʿallaqa on the Kaaba of Mecca. In this passage the storyteller use these very famous poems as literary devices to satisfy the audience. The sīra doesn‟t use to incorporate this kind of fixed texts in its narration, so it is interesting to analyse the way the author puts these od es on. However it appears that this episode also assumes a historiographical role which is essential in order to be fully understood. We aim to shed light on both the literary and the historiographical aspects of this excerpt.

Sayings and proverbs are the elements of spirit and wisdom of a people, represent the force of thought and metaphor, intelligence and spiritual wisdom, the power of observation, the truths of skills argumentation and to explore life, the power of language to express much in few words. From everything that exists in literary creation, a particular difficulty lies in translating sayings and proverbs from one language to another. From what has created in the whole literary work, a particular challenge is to translate the sayings and proverbs from one language to another. Romanian and Serbian reflects very well the virtues which are adapted to express sayings and proverbs, communicate more in a few words say more than what is said with words, if that partner has the satisfaction to decipher the intentions of the author. Both pickers’ sayings, Vuk Karadzic and Anton Pann have desire as their collections through this remember the sayings and proverbs Serbian and Romanian, and contributed to their entry into our everyday language, and gave the magnitude and expressiveness.

The purpose of the present article is to determine changes in book publication and reading habits in Latvia from the end of the 1980s onwards – a period characterized by the gradual shrinkage of the dictate of state authorities and political censorship, Latvia regaining independence in 1990 and the first years of the independent republic (up to 1995) involving the transition from the centrally planned economy to the free market economy, when the publishing houses which were established in Soviet times made attempts to pursue new development paths, whereas the newly-established ones tried to put down their roots in the publishing business.

The poetics of an empty city. Urban landscapes in catastrophic science fiction Post-apocalyptic novel – a catastrophic branch of science fiction devoted to the vision of civilization ruined by some sort of a cataclysm – managed to form a separate poetics of space creation. Images of the presented world depend on the psychological shape of the heroes who are directly exposed to the extreme boundary experience. When picturing the landscapes of desolated metropolises, the authors use solutions typical for horror and adventure novels, the ex- and impressionistic traditions as well as techniques typical for grotesque and naturalism. By extending the paths typical for science fiction, the post-apocalyptic novel moves away from the main movement and forms a separate convention of the description. The author of the article tries to shed some light on its assumptions by providing numerous examples of urban landscapes.

The article addresses the issue of the ambivalent relationship between high and popular literature. Relying on the criteria proposed by Ken Gelder, the author seeks to prove those artistic qualities of John Updike's Rabbit sequence that ensure his position among America's best writers of high literature.

Copyright of Hungarian Studies (02366568) is the property of Akademiai Kiado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses so-called "Berliner Witz" ("Berlin Wit") as a distinctive identifying characteristic of the city during the 19th century. Popular literature of the period is analyzed, as are theater entertainments and such visual sources as caricatures in order to portray the essence of the Berlin, Germany, character as revealed in wit, Berlin's dialect, and its people's peculiar sense of humor. The writings of critic Walter Benjamin, satires of Adolf Glaßbrenner, and drawings of Theodor Hosemann are adduced for their insights into this urban "Eigensinn" ("sense of self").

Greek Popularmärchen, i.e. cheap, small booklets of tales, differ from ‘good’ editions of folktales with respect to production, distribution, reception as well as contents. They have elements in common with popular novels. The ‘dialogue’ between the two prose genres is made evident on the linguistic level (shifting from standard to everyday language, restricted vocabulary, use of colloquial expressions, adjectives and adverbs, diminutive and superlative forms, metaphors and comparisons, dialogues and direct speech) as well as on the aesthetic level (sentimentalisation, moralisation, dichotomisation and amplifications of the stories). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]