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This volume on the interfaces of the concepts ´literature´ and ´crises´ presents analyses of how literary works articulate, negotiate, and challenge states and notions of crisis. It offers theorizations and exemplary analyses of both historical and contemporary relationships between literature and crises - including economic, environmental, political, social, cultural, and humanitarian crises as well as crises of identity, norms, values, and literary expression itself. A driving thesis is that literary and other cultural negotiations of crises can open up alternative ways of thinking and doing, supplying us with narratives and aesthetic experiences that do not simply reflect but also reframe our conceptions and enactments of crisis.

By presenting case studies of works ranging from the 17th-century history play to social-media life writing of the 21st century, the volume conveys a sense of how literature offers diverse and nuanced perspectives on various cultures in/of crisis that often challenge those promulgated by, for instance, the mainstream media. Literary discourse can provide frameworks in which both past and current ´ages of crises´ must not only be conceived of as periods of fear, danger, and anxiety but also as moments that contain the productive potential to disrupt and transform hegemonic discourses and assumptions.

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CONTENTS

ELIZABETH KOVACH, ANSGAR NÜNNING, IMKE POLLAND
Where Literature and Crises Meet: Coming to Terms with
Two Complex Concepts and Their Interfaces 1

I. EARLY MODERN HISTORICAL CRISES AND CRISES OF GENRE
ANGELA LOCATELLI
Experiencing and Responding to Crisis: Layered Discourses
and Hybrid Epistemologies in Early Modern English Culture 31

ELISABETH W�GHÄLL NIVRE
Early Modern Travel Accounts and the Male Body:
Exploring the Aesthetics of Human Crisis 45

EMANUEL STELZER
The Crisis in/of the History Play in Early Stuart England:
Strange Subjections in John Ford´s Perkin Warbeck (1634) 59

II. CRISES OF LANGUAGE AND REPRESENTATION
IN 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE
FREDERIK TYGSTRUP
Moments of Crisis in Post-War European Literature 75

LAURA OULANNE
The Feeling of Show and Tell: Gertrude Stein´s Tender Buttons (1914)
and the Crisis of Representation in Modernist Literature 91

VERENA LINDEMANN
Rereading Alves Redol´s O Cavalo Espantado (1960):
Literary Negotiations of a Refugee Crisis and the Remembrance
of Jewish Refugees in Lisbon 105

SANJA NIVESJÖ
Queering Form and Content: A Crisis of Whiteness
in Nadine Gordimer´s The Conservationist (1974)
and J.M. Coetzee´s In the Heart of the Country (1977) 117

ALEXANDRA EFFE
Fighting Real Fires with Fictional Flames:
J. M. Coetzee´s Literary Response to Political and Discursive Crises 131

III. LITERARY NARRATIONS OF MINDS IN CRISIS
ROBERT A. WINKLER
Requiem: Hermann Burger´s Brenner (1989) and the Crisis
of Performing Life (and Suicide) in Autobiographical Writing 145

ANNA OVASKA
Minds in Crises: Literary Representations of Psychotic Experiences 159

SUSANNE CHRIST
Dementia: ´Crisis´? ´Seasickness´? - J. Bernlef´s Novel
Out of Mind (1989) as a Corrective to Medial Representations of Dementia 175

IV. NEGOTIATIONS OF 21ST-CENTURY ISSUES & CRISES
IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURES
PETER HANENBERG
The Ultimate Crisis: Narrating and Translating Europe 191

IMKE POLLAND
"A Golden Age of Monarchy?" Staging Hypothetical Crises
in Mike Bartlett´s King Charles III (2014) 203

STELLA LANGE
Cinematic Narratives of Crises in the Film Musical Across the Universe (2007) 221

SNEZANA VULETIC
The Novel as a ´Crisis Manager´ in Contemporary Nigerian Culture:
The Case of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie´s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) 239

SABINE SCHÖNFELLNER
Do Posthumans Dream of Becoming Animals? Literary Negotiations
of the Human Being in Crisis in 21st-Century Fiction 251

SARA ERIKSSON
Social Media Life Writing and the Crisis of the Public Sphere:
Mira Gonzalez and the Trope of Oversharing 263

ANDRESSA SCHRÖDER
Exploring Beyond the Representations of the Environmental Crisis:
(Per-)Formative and Affective Conditions of the Environmental-Self 275

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