Poetik des Zirkus – Die Ästhetik des Hyperbolischen im Roman (Poetics of the Circus – Hyperbolic Aesthetics in Fiction)

Taking the cultural history of the circus phenomenon as a matrix, my first monograph explores the interplay of virtuosity, deception and exoticization in �circus novels� and �circensic novels�, concepts that I develop building on the work of M. Bakhtin and W. Iser. The research is based on a corpus of 118 American, Australian, French, German and Russian literary texts published over a period of 200 years, with a particular focus on turn-of-the-century and postmodern/ contemporary texts.