Dorothee Birke and Michael Butter, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Language and Literature, Freiburg, Germany; Tilmann Köppe, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Courant Research Centre 'Text Structures', Göttingen, Germany.

The linguae & litterae series, edited by Peter Auer, Gesa von Essen and Werner Frick, documents the research activities of the School of Language and Literature of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). These research activities in literary studies and linguistics are characterized by an approach that is theoretically and methodologically state of the art and interdisciplinarily open.

In linguistics the accent is on the corpus-based, quantitative and qualitative investigation of language; in literary studies the focus is on the comparative, transdisciplinary analysis of literary phenomena in their cultural contexts. At the same time the series deals with the productive interfaces and synergies between modern linguistics and literary studies (as well as the humanities, social and natural sciences with which they interact). It seeks a new, contemporary reformulation of the humanities research curriculum and its problem and concept orientation for the future.

The series has a clear international orientation - each volume is multilingual, containing German, English and French contributions and, depending on the volume, articles in Italian or Spanish as well. Each individual volume is peer reviewed by an international editorial board.

Each year 2-4 volumes are published.

Counterfactuality is currently a hotly debated topic. While for some disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive science, or psychology counterfactual scenarios have been an important object of study for quite a while, counterfactual thinking has in recent years emerged as a method of study for other disciplines, most notably the social sciences. This volume provides an overview of the current definitions and uses of the concept of counterfactuality in philosophy, historiography, political sciences, psychology, linguistics, physics, and literary studies. The individual contributions not only engage the controversies that the deployment of counterfactual thinking as a method still generates, they also highlight the concept's potential to promote interdisciplinary exchange without neglecting the limitations and pitfalls of such a project. Moreover, the essays from literary studies, which make up about half of the volume, provide both a historical and a systematic perspective on the manifold ways in which counterfactual scenarios can be incorporated into and deployed in literary texts.