Orbis Litterarum 

About: Orbis Litterarum is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Poetry. It has an ISSN identifier of 0105-7510. Over the lifetime, 982 publications have been published receiving 2072 citations.

The Semiotics of Typography in Literary Texts. A Multimodal Approach

Abstract: This article explores from a multimodal perspective the extent to which the visual aspect of printed verbal language is meaning-making in its own right, and how it interacts with other modes of meaning in a complex process of semiosis. To this end, the article deploys and examines the approach to multimodal discourse proposed, for instance, by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001) and Baldry and Thibault (2006), and, more specifically, the multimodal approach to typography suggested by Van Leeuwen (2005b; 2006), in order to sketch out a methodological framework applicable to the description and analysis of the semiotic potential of typography in literary texts.

Writing Women's Literary History

Abstract: The criticism of the first two volumes of Nordisk kvindelitteraturhistorie (Nordic Women's Literary History, 1993) is the point of departure for a general discussion of problems in writing women's literary history. It is argued that literary history can dispense neither with authors’biographies nor with social history and that women's texts must be analysed in context with their own literary tradition before their aesthetic value can be fully established. The problem of gender-marked texts is discussed and commented on in both the American and the French theoretical tradition, i.e. texts as representing experience versus sex as positions in the texts; it is argued that a possible concept of textual subjectivity could be the connection between the writer's self-consciousness or identity and the correspondent textual self-image understood as the subject of the discourse. In the last two sections the traditional feminist approach to history is criticized for being too closely bound up with 19th century evolutionism and the modern oppression/liberation paradigm. An alternative point of view in accordance with the history of mentality is suggested and a genre typology consisting in three varieties of the female ‘Bildungsroman’is put forward as a possible basis for writing women's literary history.

Fulcrums and borderlands : A desert reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract: The article presents a reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) in terms of the desert The desert has been a landscape of central importance for McCarthy since Blood Meridian (1985), but it is of unprecedented importance in The Road Physically, emotionally as morally, every choice the protagonists of The Road face as they trek across the bleak and abstract wasteland of a future America can in some way or other lead back to the ultimate question of deserta, of absence The problem of the desert, in other words, is the barren ground upon which the central questions of the novel rest The article concludes with the suggestion that The Road may present a new phase in McCarthy’s authorship, a shift heralded not just by McCarthy’s plunge into a new genre but possibly his entire philosophy