Feryal Cubukcu Knihy

Gardens have been a crucial part in mythology and literature. Throughout English literature for example, the idea of a garden is a recurrent image; these images largely stem from the story of the Garden of Eden, which is found in the Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In the vast library of garden literature few books focus on what the garden means – for example a conceptual idea, a real or imagined place, and a place of action. Gardens reveal the relationship between culture and nature and can in sum be seen as civilized and ‘shaped’ and therefore domesticated nature. The present volume will discuss the topic of the garden in different theoretical contexts such as ecological, botanical, literary, filmic, art, historical and cultural ones. The single contributions investigate the representations of and the interconnections between gardens and the above named domains over a wide timescale, with consideration of how gardens are represented and used as symbols.

Aestheticism is broader in scope than the philosophy of art. It is also broader than the philosophy of beauty, in that it applies to any of the responses we might expect works of art or entertainment to elicit, whether positive or negative. That is why the articles in this collective volume aim to highlight the various reverberations of aestheticism on literature and education over the centuries.

F. Cubukcu / S. Planka: Introduction – R. May Degener: Dwellers of the Deep Darkness: the Transformation of Dwarfs from Mythology to Children’s Fantasy Literature – E. Perfetto: The Mad and the Marvellous: The Dwarf in 13th Century French Epic – M. Reyes: On Women and Dwarfs: Material Engagements in the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen – F. Cubukcu: Dwarves revisited in The Hobbit – C. Magalhaes: Challenging traditions: Terry Pratchett’s dwarfs – S. Planka: Rooted in the past, prepared for the future: Dwarfs in Cornelia Funke’s Mirrorworld-novels – K. Strong Hansen: Stunted Growth: Dwarfs and the Rejection of Sexuality in the Artemis Fowl Series – J. Reiker: “Glimpses of the Horror of Normalcy” – Female Dwarfs in Literature – D. Inan: ‘The dwarfs are back on the job’: Exploring the Dwarfy Aspects of Harold Pinter’s The Dwarfs – A. Zeising: Labour as a Minor Thing: On the Iconography of Dwarfs during the Industrial Age

The purpose of this book is to present to scholars, students and enthusiasts in the fields of literature and linguistics a way to study a text analytically. Reading is multi-faceted and shaped by contexts, participants, and technologies. The ways of reading tackled most enthusiastically in this book are interpretations which show active involvement of readers: Each literary or linguistic approach can be compared to a window through which we see, grapple, comprehend, personalize and internalize the text, hence the world.