Papers by Ingo Berensmeyer
‘Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy’: The Ambivalence of Promise in Modernist Authorship Narratives
Poetica 53, 2022
This paper examines narrative representations of authors and authorship in English-language ficti... more This paper examines narrative representations of authors and authorship in English-language fiction from the 1890s to the 1920s. From Henry James onwards, such narratives revise the basic, and by that time exhausted, plot elements of the novel of literary apprenticeship as featured in Dickens’s David Copperfield and Thackeray’s Pendennis, among many others. Instead of focusing on ideas of development and professional formation, they depict authors subdued by a sense of shrinking opportunities and lack of movement. Aging or dying authors in James and Mann, young but soon disappointed authors in Joyce, Forster, or Green: wherever we look, we find an ambivalence of promise that often ends in stagnation, failure, even death. In this context, my paper presents a close reading of three less frequently discussed modernist variations on the literary bildungsroman: Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1897/1907), E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1907), and Henry Green’s Blindness (1926).
The Epic Tree Catalogue in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature
Enlistment: Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Ed. Eva von Contzen,James Simpson (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP), 2022
Post-War British Women Writers and their Cultural Impact: A Quantitative Approach
Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2022
This article uses a quantitative approach to study the reception of women writers in post-war Bri... more This article uses a quantitative approach to study the reception of women writers in post-war Britain. Using data from two influential journals in the period (1946–1960), the TLS and the Listener, we first establish a list of those contemporary British women writers who were most frequently mentioned in these magazines. We then compare their representation in the magazines to that of three comparison groups: a selection of British male contemporary writers, well-known earlier British women writers, and canonical male authors. We explore how the differential categories of gender and canonicity intersect in the (under-) representation of contemporary women writers, and how this underrepresentation not only holds true for the mid-twentieth century but, at least as it is reflected in the attention paid to writers by TLS reviewers, continues in the later 20th and early 21st century.
"'Feigning Properly": Fiction, Lying, and Moral Philosophy in the Writings of William Baldwin
Being Untruthful: Lying, Fiction, and the Non-Factual. Ed. Monika Fludernik, Stephan Packard (Baden-Baden: Ergon), 2021
This paper is going to take a fresh look at the extant writings of William Baldwin (died in or be... more This paper is going to take a fresh look at the extant writings of William Baldwin (died in or before 1563), especially his tale Beware the Cat (1552, printed 1570), in the context of Protestant debates about the legitimacy and acceptability of fiction in early modern England. While previous readings of Baldwin have highlighted religious aspects or innovative modes of narration in his texts, this paper relates Baldwin's work to early modern debates about casuistry and conscience and the usefulness, or otherwise, of imaginative literature. How does Baldwin (who also wrote a popular Treatise of Moral Philosophy as well as major parts of A Mirror for Magistrates) engage with debates about equivocation and lying, and which literary forms and traditions does he employ in order to present human interiority, moral deliberation, and social conformity or deviance? The paper will attempt to reevaluate Baldwin's writings as part of a larger reassessment of the relationship between concepts and practices of lying and fiction-making in English literature.
October 1685
Dates with Gender and Diversity. Huldeboek voor Marysa Demoor. Ed. Marianne Van Remoortel, Leah Budke, Eloise Forestier (Ghent: Skribis), 2021
‘Round Many Western Islands’: Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930)
The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction. Ed. Tobias Döring, Martina Kübler. REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 37, 73–88., 2021
Female Authorship in Modern Fiction: Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) and the History of Fictional Women Writers.
Authorship 9.1, 2020
AAA, 2018
This essay explores the literary strategies used in a contemporary novel that engages with key qu... more This essay explores the literary strategies used in a contemporary novel that engages with key questions in Shakespeare studies, book history and authorship research-something not usually considered a promising topic for a novel. The essay is in two parts: first, it addresses current ways of thinking about the relationship between Shakespeare and the history of the book, including questions of Shakespearean authorship and ownership; then it uses The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (2011) as a case study of how a contemporary novel explores these questions creatively. Connecting this case study with current research in early modern bibliography, textual studies and authorship studies should lead to an improved sense not only of the kind of writer that Shakespeare was, but also of the ways in which the possible-world scenarios of fiction can illuminate the limits of our understanding. How can Shakespeare studies contribute to contemporary fiction, and what-if anything-can a novel contribute to Shakespeare studies?
Methods of Analysis in Literary Studies, ed. Vera and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT), 2020
Handbook of English Renaissance Literature, 2019
The Faerie Queene is one of the most fascinating and complex poetic projects of the English Renai... more The Faerie Queene is one of the most fascinating and complex poetic projects of the English Renaissance; it is definitely the most ambitious. Based on a Protestant view of the world and England's role in it, The Faerie Queene (FQ) uses allegory to present a vision of humanity and human virtues that is at the same time highly abstract and very concrete and localised. Reviving classical and medieval models of narrative poetry (Homer, Ovid and Virgil; Chaucer and Langland), it also incorporates borrowings from contemporary Italian epic romance (Ariosto and Tasso) and English folklore. Its political context is defined by the 1580s and 1590s: it sets out as a celebration of the Elizabethan religious settlement and the Queen herself, but it takes on a significantly more pessimistic tone in the later books, particularly with regard to England's colonizing efforts in Ireland. As the summum opus of Elizabethan literature, FQ connects past, present and future in manifold ways, some of which are explored in this chapter.
Challenging Urban Realities in Recent London Writing: Iain Sinclair's Ghost Milk and John Lanchester's Capital, in: Resistance and the City: Challenging Urban Space, ed. Christoph Ehland and Pascal Fischer (Leiden: Brill, 2018)
This chapter analyses Henry Green’s novel Party Going (1939) as an example of modernist fiction t... more This chapter analyses Henry Green’s novel Party Going (1939) as an example of modernist fiction that bridges the divide between realist and experimental narrative modes. Party Going is a farewell to the interwar period observed through the lens of the Bright Young People novel, a subgenre that flourished around 1930. Yet it addresses wider social and aesthetic concerns in its portrayal of personal intimacy, class relations, generational change, and celebrity. It captures the atmosphere of the late 1930s, in the confined setting of a railway station, by exploring the characters’ wavering between outward appearances and inner insecurities, by contrasting their desire to be somewhere or someone else with their actual immobility, and by shrouding London in a dense fog. The omnipresence of fog underscores Green’s epistemological concern with the unknowable and the inexpressible; a concern that makes Party Going a representative example of English late modernist writing.
Komik: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch
Literature and Cultural Change (REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature), 2016
Das englische Drama und Theater von den Anfängen bis zur Postmoderne
wurde 1930 in Barnsley, Yorkshire, geboren. Zu Beginn der 1950er Jahre studierte er Architektur i... more wurde 1930 in Barnsley, Yorkshire, geboren. Zu Beginn der 1950er Jahre studierte er Architektur in Cambridge und Edinburgh. Während seiner Ausbildungszeit schrieb er erste Theaterstücke, All Fall Down (1955) und The Waters of Babylon (1957), sowie das Hörspiel The Life of Man, das einen Rundfunkpreis der BBC gewann. Daraufhin entstand als Auftragswerk für das Royal Court Theatre Live Like Pigs, mit dem Arden sich neben John Osborne und Arnold Wesker als führender Dramatiker der Nachkriegsgeneration etablierte. Arden, der häufig als 'englischer Brecht' bezeichnet wird, lässt sich jedoch nicht eindeutig dem realistischen 'kitchen-sink drama' der 'Angry Young Men' zuordnen; seine Stücke sind zwar stets politisch motiviert, heben sich jedoch durch eine größere Experimentierfreude von der realistischen Norm ab und zeichnen sich durch einen stärkeren Traditionsbezug aus (etwa zur englischen Typenkomödie Ben Jonsons in The Workhouse Donkey, 1963). Seit den 1960er Jahren arbeitete Arden verstärkt mit seiner Frau Margaretta D'Arcy zusammen und entfernte sich zusehends vom englischen Publikumsgeschmack; seine Karriere hatte bereits unter dem ökonomischen Misserfolg der frühen Stücke gelitten. Arden und D'Arcy ließen sich zu Beginn der 1970er Jahre im Westen Irlands nieder, was ihre Entfernung vom Londoner Mainstream-Publikum auch räumlich unterstreicht. Spätere monumentale Historiendramen wie The Island of the Mighty (1972) zur Thematik des Artus-Mythos oder die 26-stündige The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975) über einen der Führer des irischen Osteraufstands von 1916 zementierten Ardens und D'Arcys Außenseiterstatus. John Arden starb 2012 in Galway (Irland). Ardens berühmtestes Theaterstück ist Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (UA London, 22.10.1959, Royal Court Theatre). Der Untertitel An Un-Historical Parable macht bereits deutlich, dass dieses Stück trotz seines historischen Settings im viktorianischen England um 1880 einen Gleichnischarakter hat und eine politische und moralische Aussage für die Gegenwart transportieren will. In einer Einführung hält Arden fest, dass es sich um ein realistisches, aber kein naturalistisches Stück handelt (Arden 1982: 5). Die historischen Bezüge sind ein Element der Stilisierung, wenn nicht ganz der Brechtschen Verfremdung, einer historischen Wirklichkeit, die durch Kostüme und realistische Requisiten angedeutet, aber nicht in toto dargestellt wird. Auch die Textgestaltung hebt sich durch eine Mischung aus Prosa, lyrischem Vers und traditionellen englischen, schottischen und irischen Balladen von den Konventionen des modernen Realismus ab.
Das englische Drama und Theater von den Anfängen bis zur Postmoderne
Das englische Drama und Theater von den Anfängen bis zur Postmoderne
Published in: Anglia 133.3 (2015): 466-488
This essay presents readings of a wide range of Briti... more Published in: Anglia 133.3 (2015): 466-488
This essay presents readings of a wide range of British women’s poetry and fiction of the immediate postwar period (1945–1960) that focus on the topic of domesticity. It explores the capacities of literary texts to intervene in a slow process of cultural change in gendered attitudes towards domestic life, homemaking and notions of women’s place in the home. To illustrate the ‘nadir of British feminism’ (M. Pugh) as a structure of feeling, it also draws on advertisements and marital advice books from the 1950s. While poems by Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings and Denise Levertov respond to the pressures of domesticity, novels by Elizabeth Taylor (At Mrs Lippincote’s) and Josephine Leslie (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) point towards what might be called ‘alternative domesticities’, however imaginary. The essay argues that the possibility of women’s personal freedom (within or beyond domestic settings) in the age of the ‘angry young men’ had to be translated into the defamiliarising strains of the ‘female Gothic’ and could only be imagined in the form of comic supernatural romance or satirical verse.
Zählen und Erzählen. Eine Tagung zu numerischen Ansätzen in den Geisteswissenschaften
Mendacity in Early Modern Literature and Culture: An Introduction
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Papers by Ingo Berensmeyer
This essay presents readings of a wide range of British women’s poetry and fiction of the immediate postwar period (1945–1960) that focus on the topic of domesticity. It explores the capacities of literary texts to intervene in a slow process of cultural change in gendered attitudes towards domestic life, homemaking and notions of women’s place in the home. To illustrate the ‘nadir of British feminism’ (M. Pugh) as a structure of feeling, it also draws on advertisements and marital advice books from the 1950s. While poems by Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings and Denise Levertov respond to the pressures of domesticity, novels by Elizabeth Taylor (At Mrs Lippincote’s) and Josephine Leslie (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) point towards what might be called ‘alternative domesticities’, however imaginary. The essay argues that the possibility of women’s personal freedom (within or beyond domestic settings) in the age of the ‘angry young men’ had to be translated into the defamiliarising strains of the ‘female Gothic’ and could only be imagined in the form of comic supernatural romance or satirical verse.