Representing the Unimaginable

The Editors: Angela Stock teaches at the English Department of the University of Bielefeld (Germany).Cornelia Stott is a freelance language teacher and translator in St. Albans (England).

• Contents: Angela Stock/Cornelia Stott: Introduction: Narratives of Disaster – Ole Peter Grell: Faith and Early Modern Ways of Making Sense of Natural Disasters – Christoph Weber: God’s Wrath or Accidents of Nature? Conflicting Perspectives in the Representation of Natural Disasters in 18th-Century Germany – Anne Eyre: Post-disaster Rituals and Symbols – J. John Lennon/Hugh Smith: Shades of Dark: Interpretation and Commemoration at the Sites of Concentration Camps at Terezin and Lety, Czech Republic – Andrew S. Gross: At the Limits of Representation: Counter-tourism in Jean Améry and W. G. Sebald – Gwyneth Bodger: ‘There’s no business like Shoah business’: Commemoration and Commodification of the Holocaust – Torsten Hitz: How Passive Suffering Became a Theme for Poetry: Shell Shock and the Poetry of World War I – Thelma Wills Foote: Natural Disaster, the Uncanny and Audre Lorde’s ‘Afterimages’ – Susanne Kern: Representing without Presenting: War and its Disastrous Impact in J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K – Sylvia Mayer: The Rhetoric of Toxic Discourse: The Ironic Mode in John Cheever’s Oh What A Paradise It Seems – Anya Heise-von der Lippe: Post-apocalyptic Bodies: The Gothic Dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter – Greg Bankoff: ‘Regions of Risk’: Western Discourses on Terrorism and the Significance of Islam – Trees Depoorter: Quite an Event: The Life of the Mind in the Light of Disaster.

«Any scholar who is interested in the current trends of "disaster studies" will welcome this volume as a valuable reference for primary and secondary sources. Especially because the essays do not focus on one particular disaster, but - as the editors state - rather analyze "the representation of disaster as a literary, rhetorical, cultural and political phenomenon," they appeal to a broad range of disciplines.» (Christoph Weber, Monatshefte)