English Literature

In the English Literature section, our research and teaching focusses on a wide range of topics from a broadly Cultural Studies perspective. Areas of particular interest in our research include narratology, image studies, literary translation and adaptation, transnational phenomena, Irish literature, children’s literature as well as literature of the Romantic period and eighteenth-century literature situated at the interface of literature and music. In our teaching we offer courses in the Bachelor and Master programmes in Teacher Education and Cultural Studies. Seminar topics range from a general Introduction to English Literature to literary translation, transmedia storytelling, contemporary Irish short stories, children’s literature, the picturebook and other multimodal texts, literary nonsense, specific writers such as Oscar Wilde or genres such as eighteenth-century travel. We explore how literature works between and beyond the book covers in research-based seminars and project seminars in cooperation with partners in literary institutions, in theatre excursions and through guest lectures by contemporary authors and translators as well as by representatives of publishing houses and from the local theatre. Committed to our teaching, we employ different didactic approaches and methods, including blended learning, and use a variety of teaching materials specifically tailored to our students’ needs and interests.

Selected Research, Teaching and Practice-based Projects

1. Imagining Sameness and Difference: Constructing Nationality in Picturebooks from the 19^th to the 21^st Century
2. Theory and History of Children’s Literature in Translation
3. Adaptation Studies
4. British Songsters. Anthologising the Long Eighteenth Century at the Crossroads of Literature and Music
5. Teaching Project: Moodle ‘Introduction to English Literature’
6. Practice-based projects in cooperation with the Literaturbüro Lüneburg: Blümsday; Alice 150; Harry Potter 21