Comfort in Contemporary Culture: The Challenges of a Concept

Comfort is a prominent and highly loaded concept, as popular discourses on cosy environments, safe spaces, but also the importance of ›getting out of your comfort zone‹ attest. This volume is the first to investigate ›comfort‹ as a cultural narrative and emotional touchstone in contemporary culture. Taken together, the contributions to the volume offer an overview of different approaches to and conceptualisations of comfort in linguistics, in literary, media, and cultural studies, and art history. They showcase how ›comfort‹ serves as a valuable lens to analyse contemporary artworks and developments, e.g. live theatre broadcasting or political interventions in the US-American media sphere.

Dorothee Birke ist Professorin für Anglophone Literaturen an der Universität Innsbruck. Zuvor war sie assoziierte Professorin an der Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim und Research Fellow am Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies und am Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Zu ihren Forschungsgebieten gehören mediale Darstellungen des Wohnens, digitale Lesekulturen und Erzählforschung.

Stella Butter is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Campus Landau). In her research, she is especially interested in representations of home in contemporary Anglophone literature, contingency and literature, and the cultural functions of the British novel in the process of modernisation.