This volume brings together several contributions from linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, psychology and theology, and aims at providing a systematic approach to the strategic production and perception of ambiguity in a variety of texts and contexts.

Matthias Bauer is Professor of English Philology at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. His fields of research include early modern English literature (with an emphasis on metaphysical poetry), nineteenth-century English literature (with an emphasis on Dickens), the language of literature, and literature and religion. He was the chair of the Research Training Group 1808 "Ambiguity: Production and Perception," and he co-chairs several further research projects on interpretability in context and reading competence, as well as co-creativity in early modern English literature. He is the co-founder and editor of Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate and co-editor of Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch.

Angelika Zirker is Associate Professor of English Literatures and Cultures at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. After completing her PhD on the Lewis Carroll's Alice books (The Pilgrim as Child: Play, Language, and Salvation) in 2010, she published her second book, titled William Shakespeare and John Donne: Stages of the Soul in Early Modern English Poetry, in 2019 with Manchester University Press. Her research interests include nineteenth-century literature, with a special focus on Charles Dickens, as well as early modern poetry and drama. She is involved in various interdisciplinary research projects, and she is the co-editor of two journals, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch and Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate.

Introduction: Strategy Meets Ambiguity

Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker

I. Textual Strategies

Enduring Ambiguity

Veronika Ehrich

The (Strategic) Ambiguity of Poem Titles

Matthias Bauer and Martina Bross

The Strategic Use of Ambiguous Images in Multisemiotic Textures

Nicolas Potysch

Radical Text Theory and Textual Ambiguity: With Two Analyses of Dadaist Anti-Text Strategies

Joachim Knape

The Case of Epistemic Ambiguity and Its Strategic Production: Connecting Text and Cognition

Florian Rohmann, Lisa Ebert, Elias-Jason Güthlein and Carolin Munderich

Political Ambivalence and Dramatic Ambiguity: Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstück Die Maßnahme (1930/31)

Sebastian Meixner

II. Productive Perception

(Non)Strategic Production Planning and Ambiguity: Experimental Evidence

Bettina Remmele, Sophia Schopper, Robin Hörnig and Susanne Winkler

Reading Aloud Strategic Ambiguities in Poetic Texts

David Fishelov

Does Reanalysis Need Ambiguity?

Ulrich Detges

Are Hearer Strategies Strategic? Relevance Theory and the Strategicness of Hearer Action in Everyday Language and Language Change

Gesa Schole and Carolin Munderich

Ambiguation as Rhetorical Strategy in Sermo 38 by Maurice of Sully

Nikolai Kohler and Mirjam Sigmund

"To Define Is to Distrust": Intertextual Ambiguity in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and James Joyce's Ulysses

Leona Toker

Sacred Drama, the Law, and Ambiguities of Form in Nineteenth-Century England

Jan-Melissa Schramm

Annotating Ambiguity across Disciplines: The Tübingen Interdisciplinary Corpus of Ambiguity Phenomena (TInCAP)

Jutta Hartmann, Lisa Ebert, Gesa Schole, Wiltrud Wagner and Susanne Winkler