Margaret Atwood's novels are photographs of her characters' lives: while words only ever describe her protagonists’ blurred visions of their pasts, their 'true' stories are told in subtexts which run parallel or even contrary to the main story line and which depict the unseen, the buried, the 'untrue'. Replete with intertextual references, her fiction illuminates that and why "[w]hat isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light" (The Blind Assassin). She plays with our conventional modes of perception to make us aware of the way we frame reality in our minds. Andrea Strolz discusses in her book the interrelation between metafictional and intertextual features in two of Atwood's novels that share many similarities, even though written in different decades. She examines how Atwood weaves intertextual references into her fiction, how she facilitates a reader's recognition of the intertexts, and she shows that Atwood's narrator-protagonists also reflect on our age as one of intertextuality.

This collection consists of eight essays that examine the way narratives determine our understanding of old age and condition how the experience is lived. Contributors to this volume have based their analysis on the concept of »narrative identity« developed by Paul Ricoeur, built upon the idea that fiction makes life, and on his definition of »trace« as the mark of time. By investigating the traces of aging imprinted in a series of literary and filmic works they dismantle the narrative of old age as decline and foreclosure to assemble one of transformation and growth.

It is gradually being acknowledged that the Arabic story-collection Thousand and One Nights has had a major influence on European and world literature. This study analyses the influence of Thousand and One Nights, as an intertextual model, on 20th-century prose from all over the world. Works of approximately forty authors are examined: those who were crucial to the development of the main currents in 20th-century fiction, such as modernism, magical realism and post-modernism. The book contains six thematic sections divided into chapters discussing two or three authors/works, each from a narratological perspective and supplemented by references to the cultural and literary context. It is shown how Thousand and One Nights became deeply rooted in modern world literature especially in phases of renewal and experiment.

本书通过对自我的剖析，揭示了阿特伍德关于人的民族性、政治性、社会性和生物性深层的思索，阐发这种人文和社会关怀对文学写作的重要意义。书中主要围绕加拿大多元文化主义思想、自我与他者的精神分析以及人与动物的边界做出了超前的探索。

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien in den deutschsprachigen Ländern (GKS: Association for Canadian Studies in the German speaking countries) this collection offers an overview of the state-of-the-arts in various disciplines in Canadian Studies, such as linguistics, musicology and media studies, as well as literature and history. It opens multiple perspectives and paths for the future of our discipline. À l'occasion du 30e anniversaire de la Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien in den deutschsprachigen Ländern (GKS ; Association d'Études canadiennes dans les pays de langue allemande), nous offrons un tour d'horizon de l'état de la recherche dans les différentes disciplines en Études canadiennes, telles que la linguistique, la musicologie, les études sur les médias et les genres ainsi que sur la littérature et l'histoire. Ce volume offre un grand nombre de pistes et de perspectives pour l'avenir de notre discipline.

Fredric Jameson's survey of Structuralism and Russian Formalism is, at the same time, a critique of their basic methodology. He lays bare the presuppositions of the two movements, clarifying the relationship between the synchronic methods of Saussurean linguistics and the realities of time and history.