To this date, no comprehensive study of Sylvia Townsend Warner's short stories has been undertaken. The few publications that exist have concentrated on individual stories, but have not attempted to link them in terms of either content or form. This study closes a gap by highlighting the way Warner's stories shift to off-centre positions and by discussing Warner's highly innovative narrative style that does not conform in any way to conventional modernist or postmodernist standards. The monograph further sets out to outline the way in which Warner constantly challenges the categories we apply to classify our surroundings and analyses how Warner succeeds in creating 'queer', that is, non-heteronormative as well as strange and eccentric stories without explicitly opposing the so-called norms of her time. In this, Side-Stepping Normativity joins a vibrant conversation in queer studies which revolves around the question how critics can approach literary texts from a non-antagonistic position. Rather than focussing on the role of the critic, however, the monograph shows that Warner's texts have long achieved what queer theorists seek to achieve on an analytical level.

This volume explores the dynamic relationship between structures of kinship and the (material) conditions under which collective action emerges, with a focus on examples of this relationship from a literary and cultural studies perspective. How are kinship and collective action negotiated in literature, the arts, or in specific historical moments, and how does this change the role of representation?

Kritisches Denken ist ein zentrales Werkzeug geisteswissenschaftlichen Arbeitens. Eigenes Urteilsvermögen zu stärken und kritisches Denken zu wagen, gehört zu den wichtigsten übergeordneten Zielen eines geisteswissenschaftlichen Studiums. Diese Metakompetenz verleiht speziellen Kompetenzen erst ihren Sinn. Die Beiträge aus verschiedenen Disziplinen gehen der Bedeutung dieser unverzichtbaren Fähigkeit für Geisteswissenschaftler nach und zeigen auf, welche Ausprägungen kritisches Denken in den Geisteswissenschaften disziplinspezifisch annehmen kann.

Images of 'wounded mouths' occur frequently in literary and visual artworks artefacts from both the Global South and the Global North and often imply some form of language loss in relation to trauma. There is, however, a decisive difference between language loss as a symptomatic reaction towards a single traumatic event as explained by Western trauma theorists, and language loss as part of an insidious trauma, caused and perpetuated by continuing forms of structural discrimination. This study contrasts literary and visual images from the Global South to the Global North so as to understand strategies of trauma confrontation within the ambit of what it terms Global South trauma theory.

2004 jährte sich zum hundertsten Mal der Ausbruch des Deutsch-Namibischen Krieges (1904-1908), der im Genozid an den Herero- bzw. Nama-Völkern gipfelte. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Aufarbeitung des Völkermords an Herero und Nama in der jüngsten deutschsprachigen Belletristik.