Neuerscheinung: The Epic Imaginary. Von Charlton Payne
29. Juni 2012
Political Power and its Legitimations in Eighteenth-Century German Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter 2012 (Studien zur deutschen Literatur, 197).
Zitation
This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent ‑ and hence legitimating ‑ stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre, this ambivalence can also arise within a single epic over the course of its narrative. The present study thus traces how particular eighteenth-century epics explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. (Verlag)
Charlton Payne, PhD, ist Christoph-Martin-Wieland-Postdoctoral-Fellow in der interdisziplinären Forschungsgruppe „Plattform Weltregionen und Interaktionen“ an der Universität Erfurt, wo er seine Habilitation zu Flüchtlingsnarrativen in der deutschen Literatur fertigstellt. Er ist Alumnus des Kulturwissenschaftlichen Kollegs Konstanz (Januar-Dezember 2010).