The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels

It combines the investigation of David Mitchell’s novels with the introduction of a new critical concept to literary studies: empowerment. It probes the author’s strategies and agenda of empowering fiction on the levels of discourse, the characters.

Eva-Maria Windberger is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of British literature and culture at the University of Trier. In 2020, she completed a Ph.D. thesis exploring strategies and functions of empowerment in the novels of David Mitchell. She is co-editor (with Ralf Hertel) of the volume Empowering Contemporary Fiction: The Impact of Empowerment in Literary Studies (2021). Her current research project focuses on the performativity of East Asian identities on the British stage.