This book provides a concise introduction to lists in literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Tracing the changing functions of the literary list across time, it offers a broad range of case studies which situate selected enumerations in their respective contexts and demonstrate the versatility and creative potential of the list form. Starting with a review of previous research on the literary list, the book discusses four main constellations of enumeration: series and the great chain of being; itemization and enumerative realism; ‘letteracettera’ and experimental list-making; ‘white noise’ and creative exploits of enumeration between formal playfulness and existential exploration. The epilogue offers an analytical toolkit for the study of literary lists based on rhetorical theory.
Table of Content
1 Introduction: Listory: Writing the Literary History of the List.- 2 Series: The Great Chain of Being in the Literary Catalogue.- 3 Itemization: Enumerative Realism and the Problem of Infinity.- 4 Letteracettera: List-Making in Response to the Crises of Modernity.- 5 White Noise: Enumeration for Enumeration’s Sake?.- 6 Listology: A Formal Typology of Literary Enumeration.
About the author
Roman Alexander Barton was appointed Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in 2020. Previously, he held a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the ERC-funded project Lists in Literature and Culture. His research interests include the early modern and modernist literary list, the poetics of dramatic brevity, and philosophical fiction.
Eva von Contzen is Professor of English Literature including the Literatures of the Middle Ages at University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research interests include literary lists, especially the epic catalogue, medieval practices of narration, cognitive literary theory, and narrative theory in a diachronic trajectory.
Anne Rüggemeier is Lecturer and DFG Research Fellow at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research interests include life writing, narratology, literary lists, especially the interfaces between the forms and the politics of listmaking in 19th and 20th century literary discourse, and medical humanities. She is currently working on a book project in which she explores the poetics of isolation in English literature (17th to 21st centuries).
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