This volume focuses on queer aspects of literary lives, which result from or cause various in/securities. By focusing on moments of irritation, or queer instances, the subjects of investigation challenge established norms, hierarchies, and ideologies. At stake are one-dimensional fixations of meaning, procedures of heteronormative standardization as well as the intellectual foundations of their legitimacy. In nine chapters, the contributors investigate materials from the 17th century and the Thirty Years War (e.g. Grimmelshausen, Lohenstein) as well as the 21st (Kehlmann, Steidele), in which techniques of self-assertion and safeguarding are devised. The literary texts unhinge established societal and epistemological orders, on the one hand by pointing at the inflexibility and limitations of traditional orientation markers of the self, and on the other by the exposing abusive, discriminative, and unacceptable power structures of the day.

Daniela Fuhrmann received her PhD in Medieval Studies in 2015 with a thesis on late medieval revelation-literature of religious women, and recently completed a postdoctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift) on the picaresque novel of the 17th century. She currently holds a position at the University of Zurich and is the managing director of the Centre for Historical Mediology. Her research focuses on pre-modern narrative literature - both spiritual and secular - and on questions of narratology, poetology and mediality. Gaby Pailer received her PhD in Modern German and Comparative Literature from the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in 1992, where she held a position of Assistant Professor (equivalent) until accepting an offer at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, in 2001. At UBC she directed the Departments of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies as well as of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, from 2011-15. Her main research focus lies on gender, transculturality and performance studies in cultural historical perspective.