»Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch«

Umulige fiktioner i den romantiske roman »Ein Roman ist ein romantisches Buch«. Impossible Fictions in the Romantic NovelIn the Romantic period, the novel is regarded as a literary form that, by poetological necessity, makes experiments by means of literary representation possible. Seen in an European perspective this is almost solely a matter of early German Romanticism, Frühromantik, where Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis by formulating the novel as a specific, modern genre, try to state a new, revolutionary aesthetics. The article thus points at three characteristic features of the novel’s poetics within this context: 1) the novel contains a double poetics of formal heterogeneity and spiritual homogeneity; 2) the novel gets its value through its inherent epistemology of world views; 3) the novel of early German Romanticism understands itself in a productive split of an utopian vision that never can be fulfilled and an auto-reflexivity exactly because of the knowledge of permanent unfulfillment. Further,the article argues, an aesthetics of impossible fictions evolves as the potential and heritage of this kind of poetics. In the last part of the article, a novel of the Swedish (post-)Romantic author Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793-1866), Drottningens juvelsmycke (The Queen’s Tiara, 1834), is read as way of representing, through the constitution of the main character, Tintomara, a principle of the absolute that displays the borders of novelistic representation

Biotic and abiotic factors investigated in two <i>Drosophila </i>species – evidence of both negative and positive effects of interactions on performance

Multiple environmental factors acting in concert can interact and strongly influence population fitness and ecosystem composition. Studies investigating interactions usually involve only two environmental factors; most frequently a chemical and another abiotic factor such as a stressful temperature. Here we investigate the effects of three environmental factors: temperature, an insecticide (dimethoate) and interspecific co-occurrence. We expose two naturally co-occurring species of Drosophila (D. hydei and D. melanogaster) to the different environments during development and examine the consequences on several performance measures. Results are highly species and trait specific with evidence of two- and three-way interactions in approximately 30% of all cases, suggesting that additive effects of combined environmental factors are most common, and that interactions are not universal. To provide more informative descriptions of complex interactions we implemented re-conceptualised definitions of synergism and antagonism. We found approximately equal proportions of synergistic and antagonistic interactions in both species, however the effects of interactions on performance differed between the two. Furthermore, we found negative impacts on performance in only 60% of interactions, thus our study also reveals a high proportion of cases with positive effects of interactions

Reversibility of developmental heat and cold plasticity is asymmetric and has long-lasting consequences for adult thermal tolerance

The ability of insects to cope with stressful temperatures through adaptive plasticity has allowed them to thrive under a wide range of thermal conditions. Developmental plasticity is generally considered to be a non-reversible phenotypic change, e.g. in morphological traits, while adult acclimation responses are often considered to be reversible physiological responses. However, physiologically mediated thermal acclimation might not follow this general prediction. We investigated the magnitude and rate of reversibility of developmental thermal plasticity responses in heat and cold tolerance of adult flies, using a full factorial design with two developmental and two adult temperatures (15 and 25°C). We show that cold tolerance attained during development is readily adjusted to the prevailing conditions during adult acclimation, with a symmetric rate of decrease or increase. In contrast, heat tolerance is only partly reversible during acclimation and is thus constrained by the temperature during development. The effect of adult acclimation on heat tolerance was asymmetrical, with a general loss of heat tolerance with age. Surprisingly, the decline in adult heat tolerance at 25°C was decelerated in flies developed at low temperatures. This result was supported by correlated responses in two senescence-associated traits and in accordance with a lower rate of ageing after low temperature development, suggesting that physiological age is not reset at eclosion. The results have profound ecological consequences for populations, as optimal developmental temperatures will be dependent on the thermal conditions faced in the adult stage and the age at which they occur