Textual intricacies

The starting point and major source of inspiration for this volume was the fascination in great, complex, and demanding texts in English. The nine essays by German and Russian scholars on important works of British, New English/postcolonial and American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries focus on textual intricacies - the ambiguities and ambivalences of those texts, the unique character of narrative representation. Special emphasis is placed on the categories of structure and intertextuality. Among the diverse critical approaches employed are close reading, narratology, deconstruction, contextualization, comparative studies, and reception history. More specifically, there are studies of (leit)motifs, images, poetics, and stylistics; intertextuality, autointertextuality, autoparody, and autoillusion; authorship, metanarration, and metafiction, and postmodernism. The result of the critical re-reading of primary texts is bound up not only with a new critical re-assessment of individual texts and authors, but, significantly, with new theoretical insights as well - a more differentiated view of the characteristics both of intertextuality and postmodernism.