Subject collection: Literary Studies (221 titles, 1971–2015)

The contributions to Iconic Investigations deal with linguistic or literary aspects of language. While some studies analyze the cognitive structures of language, others pay close attention to the sounds of spoken language and the visual characteristics of written language. In addition this volume also contains studies of media types such as music and visual images that are integrated into the overall project to deepen the understanding of iconicity – the creation of meaning by way of similarity relations. Iconicity is a fundamental but relatively unexplored part of signification in language and other media types. During the last decades, the study of iconicity has emerged as a vital research area with far-reaching interdisciplinary scope and the volume should be of interest for students and researchers interested in scholarly fields such as semiotics, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor studies, poetry, intermediality, and multimodality.

Containing more than fifty essays by major literary scholars, International Postmodernism divides into four main sections. The volume starts off with a section of eight introductory studies dealing with the subject from different points of view followed by a section that deals with postmodernism in other arts than literature, while a third section discusses renovations of narrative genres and other strategies and devices in postmodernist writing. The final and fourth section deals with the reception and processing of postmodernism in different parts of the world.

Three important aspects add to the special character of International Postmodernism: The consistent distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism; equal attention to the making and diffusion of postmodernism and the workings of literature in general; and the focus on the text and the reader (i.e., the reader's knowledge, experience, interests, and competence) as crucial factors in text interpretation.

This comprehensive study does not expressly focus on American postmodernism, although American interpretations of postmodernism are a major point of reference. The recognition that varying literary and cultural conditions in this world are bound to produce endless varieties of postmodernism made the editors, Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, opt for the title International Postmodernism.

In both the real and the symbolic sense, the action of the Liaisons is writing letters, which is to say, giving the phrase an ontological twist, that writing is its own subject. Letters in an epistolary novel recount and reenact simultaneously, without distinction. Doing and telling are congruent, interchangeable, identical activities. The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are the principal characters in this novel because they know best how to use the word. They control and direct others through their writing. From our perspective, however, to listen well is an even more critical and fundamental activity than writing well. The ultimate victor in this novel of seduction and deception is not necessarily the one who writes best but rather he, or she, who reads best. Concentrating on the reader places the entire epistolary exchange in a new light and accentuates the use of the word as an instrument of power and the letter as a tool for domination.