Identitätsbildung in ausgewählten Romanen der Black British Literature: Genre, Gender und Ethnizität

Abstract

ta (1832) by John Richardson, while proposing that Canadian landscape writing and exploration literature had to use ‘new’ means of writing in contrast to the European variants. Omhovère further uproots discourse from its colonial roots by explicating that conventional landscape writing has been subverted by contemporary Canadian writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Robert Kroetsch, or Aritha van Herk by way of an interrogation of geography. A number of essays in this volume address the relevance of landscape writing as “emptying, erasing, denying visibility” (29). Isabelle Alfandary’s most interesting yet erratic essay, “Page-Landscapes in the Theatre of Gertrude Stein” (257–270), examines Stein’s “landscape” plays (257). Generally speaking, Stein emphasizes language and word play over dramatic conventions such as plot, character, and scenery. Alfandary argues that “for Stein, landscape is an animated space in motion perpetual but imperceptible” (267) and that “Stein conceives of landscape as a way to tame alterity, a kind of economic process aiming to bring down libidinal excitement to a tolerable level” (269). Alfandary explores Stein’s unique playwriting aesthetic based in avant-garde drama, photography, and cinema. Richard Pedot’s brilliant essay on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness interrogates how place becomes placeless and therefore “unmappable” as “the African landscape in Conrad’s novel emerges as a site both of inscription and de-territorialisation” (271). This volume showcases the quintessential notion that landscape is neither realistic nor imaginary. Among other essays that focus on visual arts, Marjorie Vanbaelinghem’s essay on “Landscape as Reflection in British Contemporary Art” (173– 192) concentrates on painters such as Maurice Cockrill, Michael Andrews or Peter Doig. The contribution by David Jasper analyses English writer Jim Crace’s fifth novel Quarantine which retells the Biblical story of Christ’s forty days in the desert by drawing on the theological and biblical images of a desert. In short, the volume unravels a literary-visual richness of landscape texts and images, without having to reproduce the images themselves. The essays in this volume offer thoughtful and nuanced reflections of landscape and make a compelling case for why we must continue to explore literary and visual landscape representations from the 17th century to the present day. By focusing on the theme of landscape, this volume displays the potential of literature and the visual arts to soften the boundary between culture and nature and to promote awareness and contrasting views of particular historical and geopolitical issues pertaining to landscape perceptions.