"My age is as a lusty winter"

This collection of essays expresses the contributors' wish to honour the impressive competence and the untiring commitment of Peter Erlebach and Thomas Michael Stein in British Studies. Both are professors in the Department of English and Linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, where they have been teaching for more than three decades. As academic teachers and scholars they have not only contributed to the profile of their university and enhanced British Studies in Germany, their research has also been acknowledged internationally. The essays included in this volume mirror the breadth and the depth of Peter Erlebach's and Thomas Michael Stein's teaching and research. Paying tribute to the major genres of literature, the sections on prose, poetry and drama shed new light on seminal works by both British and American writers, while the multiplicity of the scholarly approaches reflects the diversity of contemporary British and American Studies. Tribute to the fact that texts are language in print is paid by the linguistic contributions to this volume - they range from the influence of ancient Egyptian texts on word-formation to the intricacies of English as it is spoken in the 21st century.