Anecdotal Modernity: Making and Unmaking History (Buchreihe Der Anglia / Anglia) (Buchreihe Der Anglia / Anglia Book Series, 68)

The __Anglia Book Series__ (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory. Acknowledgements Table of Contents Introduction TRUTH The Heathen in Heaven: Anecdote and Truth in Dante’s Commedia Anecdotal Ambiguity: Andrew Marvell A Hideous and Intolerable ... Anecdote? Moby-Dick and Questions of Truth Seen from the Human and the Non-Human Side EVENT Heinrich von Kleist’s “Anecdote from the Last War”: W-hole, the Joke an Anecdote (Nearly) Made Individual Case, Example, Exception: The Range of the Anecdotal in Fontane Once is Nothing at All is Once: Traces of Eventfulness in Joyce and Beckett The Politics of Splitting: Gertrude Stein’s “Reflection on the Atomic Bomb” STORY Plot and Anecdote in Henry James and Julian Barnes The Relevance of the Irrelevant: Wisdom and/of Contingency Accumulated Time, the Anecdote, and the Vertical Imagination RUMOR The Fun of Deep Gossip: Lord Cornbury as Queen in Drag An Anecdote Peddler from the Age of Goethe Anecdotal Manifestations of the Evangelical Here and Now: Four Conversions in Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton DETAIL The Cage of the Image and the Trace of the Snail: On the Language of Pictorial Detail Anecdote vs. History: Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk A Unique Universalism: Ben Shahn and the Rhetoric of Visual Anecdotes Wallace Stevens: Anecdote and Lyric CODA Philosophy and Anecdote: Hegel’s “Lehrer Löffler” “Fleurs de Paris” List of Contributors

The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.