Brevitas 2: Bad weather and border crossings

ed. by Sylvia Jurchen and Silvan Wagner

Abstract

The abstract transgression of boundaries as a structural moment of pre-modern short fiction in particular is sometimes concretized in bad weather. The one liminal twist that often determines small-scale epic storytelling also manifests itself in the change of weather, which for the pre-modern era is fundamentally more than an arbitrary, chaotic natural phenomenon: weather – ›beautiful‹ weather, but above all ›bad‹ weather – is fundamentally a medium of communication between transcendence and immanence, between God and creation. In this context, weather is not only an ontological transgression per se, but – especially in the form of ›bad‹ weather - often goes hand in hand with existential transgressions on a creaturely level.

The contributions in this volume shed light on the connection between small epic narratives and transgressions of boundaries, particularly in the area of weather.