Comfort in Contemporary Culture: The Challenges of a Concept

Dorothee Birke · Stella Butter

Okt 2020 · Edition Kulturwissenschaft Buku 212 · transcript Verlag

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Comfort is a prominent and highly loaded concept, as popular discourses on cosy environments, safe spaces, but also the importance of ›getting out of your comfort zone‹ attest. This volume is the first to investigate ›comfort‹ as a cultural narrative and emotional touchstone in contemporary culture. Taken together, the contributions to the volume offer an overview of different approaches to and conceptualisations of comfort in linguistics, in literary, media, and cultural studies, and art history. They showcase how ›comfort‹ serves as a valuable lens to analyse contemporary artworks and developments, e.g. live theatre broadcasting or political interventions in the US-American media sphere.

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Dorothee Birke is associate professor of English literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Her main research interests include political drama, digital book culture, and the history of the novel. She has held research fellowships at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Stella Butter is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Campus Landau). In her research, she is especially interested in representations of home in contemporary Anglophone literature, contingency and literature, and the cultural functions of the British novel in the process of modernisation.