The relation between adventure and contingency is an ambivalent one. This ambivalence can be described by using a distinction of two aspects already tied together in âventiure (as a French foreign word in German), distinguished by Jacob Grimm as “begebenheit” versus “erzählte geschichte selbst,” rendered as ‘type of event’ versus ‘narrative pattern’ in the terminology of the Munich research group Philology of Adventure. On the one hand, it seems obvious that for an adventure, as a type of event, a contingent element is a crucial precondition. An adventurous agent must willingly expose himself to this contingent event and interpret it as a ‘Chance’ (using a French foreign word in German, again), i.e. as opportunity to gain by risking, be it simply capital—as in the economic usage of the word, from English ‘Merchant Adventurers’ to contemporary ‘Venture Capital’—, or be it fame or prestige—as in Medieval and Early Modern adventure epics and novels. On the other hand, adventure, as a narrative pattern, tends to reduce contingencies in order to ‘make sense’. Even if adventure tales tolerate and actually support episodic structures, these episodes must, after all, be motivated and integrated into a plot. In other words: Writing an adventure story always already implies to tame (or perhaps rather frame) the very contingency it is based on. Adventure stories are therefore typical cases of “eliminat[ing] the contingent part of the literary phenomena it deals with” (Duprat and Jordan, introduction to the present special issue). This tension is, however, rarely acknowledged in the history of literary theory—here taken in the longue durée, starting with Early Modern poetics. The present essay discusses some steps from the history of relevant theories, with a particular emphasis on Giorgio Agamben's recent eulogy of adventure.

The first phase of research on censorship in the Habsburg monarchy can be located in the decades around 1900. Major archival documents were edited, for example material on theater censorship by Karl Glossy. The researchers of the early phase were for the most part declared opponents of all censorship; one need only recall the polemical writings of Heinrich Hubert Houben. If one disregards the work of the outstanding censorship researcher Julius Marx and a few other individual studies of merit, interest in censorship subsequently waned 1 . It is only in the last two decades that a breath of fresh air has been felt again in the field. This may be related to the recently renewed discussion of censorship and censorship-like processes concerning printed works, but above all the internet in various parts of the world. Likewise, disputes about language regulations and taboos concerning supposedly discriminating expressions up to the so-called Cancel culture are on the agenda. As far as the study of censorship in the Habsburg monarchy is concerned, new questions can now be asked and new perspectives opened up on the basis of the pool of facts that is already at hand as a result of preliminary studies. This collection of essays, compiled by Marijan Dović, following a panel discussion at the conference of the European Society of Comparative Literature in Rome in September 2022, bears witness to this. First of all, it should be noted that until a few years ago, censorship research focused strongly on individual cases of prominent authors and works, on the one hand, and on Vienna, and thus on the headquarters of the monarchy, on the other. However, the monarchy consisted of numerous lands and administrative units, 2 a number of which had national and literary languages other than German. 1 The older studies are cited and listed in (Bachleitner, 2022). 2 The total number of lands fluctuated considerably during the long 19th century. The 1910 census distinguished fifteen lands in Cisleithania, to which were added Hungary as well as Croatia and Slavonia, and

This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about “Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures” based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a theoretical framework, and the specific case study concerning Antonia Arslan. The project originates from two concerns: the first one being the awareness of the loss of poets and writers’ long-lived faith in the creative power of the artistic gesture, a widespread belief before the two world wars, and the second one consisting in a reflection on a general change of the theoretic framework of literature, especially in the case of the narration of traumatic experiences such as wars, genocides, migrations and displacements of people, which have taken place in Europe during the 20th Century [Neohelicon, 2004(1), Migratio et litterae].