Books in the Mediated Fictions series

The book analyses the contemporary academic mystery novel through the lenses of the classical detective novel and the university novel. The authors of the analysed mysteries are scholars who invent apparently insoluble criminal conundrums to highlight the problems haunting the higher education system, such as plagiarism or fight for tenure.

This study focuses on emblematic intertextual strategies in contemporary British fiction. Analysing the process of adaptation, pastiche, transworld identity and historiographic metafiction, the book demonstrates how the intertextual impulse can be inscribed not only in the structure and semantics of a given text but also in the narrative plane.

The volume demonstrates the scope of utopian thinking and the enduring significance of past utopian fictions and historical events. The essays examine the concept of utopia in a variety of contexts, such as philosophy, translation, music, social and political issues, and global utopian fiction.

The study focuses on the problem of spatiality in literature. Organized around three defining problems - spatial topoi, genres and methods - the volume gives the reader a good insight into a range of approaches to contemporary research on literary space in poetry, drama and fiction.

This book is a cognitive-poetic study of the seven novels of Charles Williams (1886-1945). The author approaches the multidimensional narratives with reference to cognitive phenomena and mechanisms such as the figure-ground organization, conceptual metaphors, conceptual blending, image schemata, scripts, cognitive deixis, and empathy.

This book presents a pioneering survey of the professional career of a woman better known as a campaigner for women's suffrage in the early twentieth century. It uses archive material to construct a chronology of productions in which she was involved either as author or actress in a twenty-year period from 1895.

The book offers a thorough study of the literary tensions and two-world structure of the fantastic short stories by H. G. Wells (1866-1946). It exposes Trickster games in the storytelling and pinpoints his staple methods of artistic composition.

The book focuses on the uncanny in the domestic space of Elizabeth Bowen's fiction. Providing a psychoanalytic reading of selected works it aims to examine the image of the house in Bowen's prose and to analyse its uncanniness in relation to the characters' identity.

Dreams, Nightmares and Empty Signifiers is the first study of contemporary literary representations of the English country house. The book analyses contemporary novels, including Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Ian McEwan's Atonement and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger by situating them in a broader context of manorial literary tradition.

This book analyses the poetry of Ciaran Carson, a Northern-Irish writer. In particular, it discusses the tension between orality and textuality. The author shows how it operates in Carson's major subjects: memory, city and history. Finally, the limits of this dialectic are sketched from an epistemological and metaphysical perspective.

The book focuses on the category of character in fiction. It analyses characters in individual texts by authors ranging from Conrad to Coetzee considered from rhetorical, structural, functional and cognitive perspectives; in genre contexts from utopia and fantasy to campus fiction; and in extra-textual contexts from intertextuality to autobiography.

The volume explores intersections between the traditional utopian discourse and recent media: music, comics, TV series, feature films, documentaries, fan fiction, computer games and web projects. It shows the variety of forms of expression of utopian impulses and their relocation and reinterpretation in the contemporary culture of convergence.

The work comprises adaptation studies of selected utopian/dystopian fictions written and filmed in Europe and America during the last century. It focusses on ways of constructing fictional realities as well as on techniques of rendering literary utopias/dystopias into film and allows a deep insight into the history of cinema.

The book discusses the evolution of the urban chronotope in the selected novels by Peter Ackroyd, an acclaimed British author. The examined narratives illustrate the transformation from the postmodern tenets of historiographic metafiction into a unique urban mythopoetics by means of a semiotic analysis.

The book offers a detailed analysis of all mainstream novels of Iain Banks. It explores the question of mediation, the process of a semiotic (re)construction of the world on the part of Banks's characters, with reference to four paradigms of fictional worlds established by the author's first novel, The Wasp Factory.

Monika Kocot's book on Edwin Morgan's literary achievement, both poetry and drama, foregrounds the themes of cultural transgression, dialogism of the author's creative design, and various, potentially subversive games of sense creation: "verbivocovisual" constellations, mythopoetic "writings-through," and intersemiotic translations.

This monograph contains analyses of Gothic texts: literary works, films, and video games. It shows the expansion of the convention across the ages and the media. The studies aim at being instructive as well as inspirational for university teachers and students of the Gothic alike.