Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 135 natural narratives and - what he terms - “natural authors”, he makes the case for revising the classical paradigms of narratology. There is no doubt that the volume makes a highly readable, timely and pertinent contribution to the field of narratology. Most of the suggestions of revising, extending or discarding the paradigms of classical narratology are convincing and certainly warrant more critical attention. But, of course, the volume also begs a number of questions, most importantly concerning the term ‘postclassical’ itself. What is the heuristic value of the term, if applied to both a frame-abiding and a frame-shattering engagement with the structuralist paradigm? Even though the editors do not envisage “one overarching model”, their project is based upon the premise that “considerable consolidation despite continuing diversity is called for at this moment” (5). However, there are substantial conceptual, methodological and ideological differences between approaches that scrutinize narrative elements against the foil of power structures and gender differences (see e.g. Lanser) and approaches that are mainly interested in textual generalities. These disparities strike me as being too huge to be subsumed under the umbrella-term ‘postclassical’. In this respect, Werner Wolf’s suggestion to term approaches that mainly complement classical narratology by postclassical elements (leaving classical premises intact) “neo-classical” (59) seems indeed enticing. So, yes, this is an excellent contribution to narrative scholarship - but perhaps not under the single heading of ‘postclassical narratology’. Birgit Neumann Anglistik/ Cultural Studies Universität Passau Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Gender and Creation. Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority and Authorship. (Regensburger Beiträge zur Gender-Forschung 4). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Sabine Schülting In her seminal article on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Barbara Johnson reads both the novel and Shelley’s introduction to the third edition of 1831 as “the description of a primal scene of creation” (Johnson 1996: 248) that closely links biological parenting and literary authorship. In Johnson’s account, Shelley is concerned with the monsters, the “hideous progeny” (Shelley 1996: 173), produced by men who desire to give birth and by women who desire to write (Johnson 1996: 248). The ways in which biological procreation, intel- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 136 lectual creativity and (literary) authorship have been, and still are, informed by cultural discourses of sexual difference is also at the centre of this collection of essays. Since the beginning of the second wave of feminism, the contested field of female authorship and women’s writing has been of crucial interest to feminist literary studies. Continuing this line of research, the present volume seeks to broaden the perspective by discussing “metatextual - and gendered - depictions of processes of creativity in literature and culture” (p. 14). Combining authorship questions with a focus on phenomena that cut across the boundaries between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ creation, it explores the tensions between literature, myth and scientific discourses. The volume brings together thirteen essays which originated in a lecture series at the University of Regensburg in 2009/ 10. The main focus is on English literature, from the Middle Ages to postcolonialism and postmodernity, complemented by some excursus on French, American and German writers. Although the structure of the volume suggests a historical argument, the choice of texts discussed in the contributions seems to have been primarily motivated by personal research interests and would have profited from a clearer editorial agenda. The collection offers a broad and differentiated perspective on canonical and non-canonical, male and female, medieval and early modern writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Robert Burton, Aemilia Lanier, Anne Braedstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips and Anne Finch. However, there is a strong imbalance between this first part, comprising the contributions by Annette Kern-Stähler, Danielle Clarke, Christoph Heyl, Anne-Julia Zwierlein, and Rainer Emig, and the volume’s treatment of later epochs. The selection of British literature of the second half of the twentieth-century, for example, is considerably smaller, being confined to only two articles, one by Brigitte Glaser on the postcolonial poetry of “women of colour” (p. 224) writing in English, and one by Francesca Nadja Palitzsch, on Jeannette Winterson. Although Winterson’s novels are undoubtedly pertinent to the overall topic of the volume, they still only represent one voice in the polyphonic field of contemporary fiction. What is perhaps more lamentable, many of the (interesting) connections between individual articles remain largely implicit: the creative potential offered by the revision of myth and mythological figures (Clarke, Achim Geisenhanslüke); the link between melancholy, gender and authorship (Zwierlein, Emig); Romantic notions of authorship (Helga Schwalm, Ingo Berensmeyer); the relation between concepts of divine and human creation (Zwierlein, Katharina Rennhak); as well as the various strategies, employed by women writers, to defend female authorship (Kern-Stähler, Zwierlein, Rennhak, Virginia Richter, Palitzsch, Glaser). An index would have been useful in this regard. The editor’s “Introduction” certainly seeks to establish a dialogue between the chapters by suggesting central topics and a variety of research questions such as “Concepts of ‘Creation’ and ‘Creativity’”, “Concepts of ‘Authority’ and ‘Authorship’”, “Female Authorship and Creativity”, “The ‘Genderization of Narrative’”, and “Gendered Myths of Creation and Creativity” (pp. 11-23). However, the respective passages are relatively short, and they do not sufficiently relate the Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 137 volume to the wide range of extant research on similar questions. Despite the ambitious claim in the blurb that the collection is “conceived as a cross-over between gender studies, science and literature studies, the history of medicine and biology and cultural studies”, the theoretical and methodological implications of this assertion are not fully explored. In addition, how the chapters on English literature relate to the American, French, and German examples is not explained, and some of the articles still reveal their origin as a contribution to a series of lectures. But what is indispensable for a paper addressed primarily to students, namely to give general introductions to e.g. humoral pathology (Emig), Adamic language (Heyl), literary history (Junkerjürgen, Glaser), or “the development from feminism to gender studies and queer theory” (Berensmeyer, p. 160), may strike some readers as odd in a volume that is primarily addressed to scholars working in the field. Having said this, I hasten to add that a number of contributions offer compelling readings of both canonical and lesser known material. This is particularly the case in those articles that take up the central research question of the volume and explore the ways in which poetological writing is imbued with, and becomes meaningful through, cultural discourses of gender, including myths, metaphors of the sexual act and of giving birth, as well as scientific knowledge of the human body. I can only briefly mention three examples here that I found especially inspiring. Danielle Clarke regards the repeated allusion to Philomela and/ or the retelling and revision of the Ovidian myth in early modern poetry as the expression of a specifically “Renaissance dilemma”, “namely that the adaptation of classical rhetoric and poetics to the vernacular raises a series of complex questions around access to this mode of circulating cultural capital” (p. 61). Clarke shows that the identification with Philomela proved particularly productive for the early modern (male) poet. The myth provided a figure that allowed him to address issues such as the poet’s authority and his position in public, the connection between poetry and affect, as well as questions of poetic competition and stylistic decorum. Focusing on, among other texts, The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, Paradise Lost, and The Blazing World, Anne-Julia Zwierlein discusses the merging of early modern poetics with the discourse on melancholia “as part of a sexualized aetiology of creativity” (p. 85). The move from (male) lovesickness to “melancholic creativity” (p. 90), closely associated with masculinity, implies an appropriation of the female power of giving birth. In early modern texts this masculine narcissism is “simultaneously glorified and vilified” (p. 90). What is perhaps most surprising, it also offered a point of reference for female writers. Articles like these move beyond the opposition of male versus female authorship that represents a too simplistic approach to more complex negotiations, as Helga Schwalm convincingly argues in her chapter on “The Lake Poets/ Authors”. She subjects conventional assumptions on Romantic literature to scrutiny, in particular the postulate of an inextricable link between male authorship, the construction of Romantic subjectivity and the literary genres of poetry and autobiography. Focusing on autobiographical texts by Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 138 William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey, Schwalm develops a nuanced approach to the “‘geopolitical’ mode of selfwriting” (p. 132) of the three poets, which complicates traditional accounts of Romanticism. In the three poets’ engagement with the Lake District she discerns a wide variety of “autobiographical practices at work” (p. 146), dynamically moving between the two poles of self-centring and dissemination of the self (cf. p. 145). Refraining from the feminist celebration of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals as a subversive challenge to the masculinist assertion of autonomous subjectivity and authorship, Schwalm manages, in her subtle readings, to transcend the binary oppositions between male and female and the (allegedly) corresponding tendencies towards an assertion of subjectivity in contrast to its decentring. I wonder whether Schwalm’s article also implies that “the monstrousness of selfhood” is not only “embedded within the question of female autobiography” (Johnson 1996: 251, my emphasis), as Barbara Johnson claimed in her article on Frankenstein. Many of the contributions brought together in Gender and Creation show that since the Middle Ages and in texts by both male and female writers, attempts at conceptualizing creativity and authorship have repeatedly called forth disconcerting narratives of melancholy and insanity, the uncanny mythological figures of Philomela, the Medusa and the Sirens, and violent images of penetration, rape, childbirth and castration. Gender is a powerful category that informs these discourses, both stabilizing and destabilizing the self-assertion of the author that - again and again - comes dangerously close to the monstrous. “Myths of creativity”, the volume convincingly shows, represent a fascinating field of research that has only just begun to be charted. References Johnson, Barbara (1996). “My Monster / My Self.” In: Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. A Norton Critical Edition. New York/ London: W.W. Norton. 241-251. Shelley, Mary (1996). “Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831).” In: Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. A Norton Critical Edition. New York/ London: W.W. Norton. 169-173. Sabine Schülting Institut für Englische Philologie Freie Universität Berlin