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Cultural Text Studies  is a research project initiated by the Department of Languages, Culture and Aesthetics at Aalborg University. The present intro­duct­ory volume launches a series of themed monographs which will be edited by researchers at the Dept., occasionally aided by friends and associates from other programmes. The purpose of the series is to be a forum for the publication of results of research in the broadly defined area of cultural text.

This interdisciplinary field of research springs from an emergent interest in both studying texts culturally and in studying culture as text. Thus it is cultural text studies in the sense that the object of study consists of all readable cultural phenomena which are regarded as texts in a much more broadly defined sense than in the traditional field of literary studies. Yet it is also cultural text studies, in the sense that, while the approach is cultural as opposed to, say, formalist, the work often entails an intense engagement with texts and close readings thereof.

CTS – An Introduction is a volume authored by present and past members of the English programme’s teaching staff in the fields of culture, literature and media studies. The essays range widely in terms of the period, genre, and medium of the texts investigated. Focus areas include Victorian literature and art; high modernism, especially approached from the point of view of a centre/margin discourse; and finally postmodernist aesthetics and its embedded move from literary into cultural studies, as witnessed by essays on world music, shoes, Hollywood, the post-ironic, the de-territorialized, and the post-human condition as cultural texts.

Table of contents

Bent Sørensen: Introduction

Jørgen Riber Christensen: Remediating Shakespeare: The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery

Jens Kirk: Books and Selves: John Stuart Mill's Autobiography

Jørgen Riber Chrisensen: Dickens and Kipling: Two Good Victorians

Jesper Trier Gissel: Poetic Means for Social Ends: Reading Positions in Modernist Interwar Poetry

Lene Yding Pedersen: Imagining Ireland: The Cultural Space of the Irish Free State

Bent Sørensen: "Small, but exalted": Otherness in Nella Larsen's Novels

Jens Kirk: The Production of the Martians

Ben Dorfman: The ABCs, or GHQs, of Global Text Reading

Steen Christiansen: Hollywood as Cultural Text

Tore Rye Andersen: Down with the Rebels! David Foster Wallace and Postironical Literature

Camelia Elias: A Mile in Her Shoes: Culture Metamorphses in Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity

Steen Christiansen: Transtextuality, Paranoia, and Apophenia in Pattern Recognition

See also CTS 2: Transatlantic