Books in the Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture series

The book is the first academic study of Henry Beissel¿s bilingual poetic autobiography. The Canadian poet going back through memories to his childhood in Nazi Germany, wrote a long poem in English and reinterpreted it in German ¿ his mother tongue, neglected for decades. The study offers a comparative reading of the two distinctly different versions of the poem, juxtaposing various perspectives, voices and recollections. Beissel¿s bilingual project is depicted as "memory workshop", that mediates between cultures. The work examines Beissel¿s biography and the theories of memory, autobiography and bilingualism. It refers to metafiction, the poetic child¿s figure and writing trauma, as well as explores poetic complexities of memory and identity.

The book explores the notion of borderlands and the concept of nomadic subjectivity as manifested in selected novels by Chicana/Latina and contemporary Polish women authors. It seeks to propose a poetics of borderlands that emerges from the condition of nepantla (being torn, not belonging anywhere). Language, collective identities and motherhood are the main issues under scrutiny. Application of feminist literary criticism, postcolonial criticism and comparative literature studies in examination of literary works reveals interesting parallels between works of authors that have little in common at first glance. One of the book objectives is to draw attention to contemporary Polish writers, whose oeuvre is not widely researched in the mainstream literary studies.

This book, Nature Walks: Peripatetic Tradition in Non-fiction Travel Writing of Robert Macfarlane examines pedestrianism in the long history of British travel writing and examines the consequences that foot mobility has for the walking self and for the meaning-making of the surrounding world. This book also discovers how the books by Robert Macfarlane, a widely read British author, on the one hand, uphold some of the long-established tenets of the travel genre, and, on the other hand, demonstrate an openness to departure, renewal, and the reconfiguration of discursive practices. Nature Walks offers a profound examination of the ways by which literary language may respond to our present environmental challenges.

The volume consists of fifteen papers discussing a vast array of issues and aspects relating to the concept of cultural memory. Taking as a standpoint the Halbwachs/Assman critical tradition, the individual contributions trace the relevance of the concept in the context of a wide range of areas, from medieval studies, through Victorian culture, up to multifold examples from the contemporary literary scene, especially speculative fiction. The collection of papers is designed as an informative and exhaustive overview tracing the relevance of the notion of cultural memory as a reference point in the discussion of cultural continuity and transformations in the diachronic context of the evolution of European culture.

The study analyzes the factual and fictional elements in three novels by Joyce Carol Oates. The innovative genre used, which separates itself from previous similar forms of fact writing, aims to give a new voice to females who died in mysterious circumstances, and to provide a criticism of contemporary American society and its treatment of women.

This book offers new readings of recent Irish plays. Following C. Morash's historiographic metaphor of Babel, it combines this and other appropriations of the Biblical theme of building found in the plays by such authors as M. McKenna, D. Bolger, S. Gregg, R. Dormer or S. Barry.

The book examinees the multi-layered and multidimensional theme of "identity construction" in Tony Harrison's work, focusing on key texts such as v. and the School of Eloquence sequence.

The book is a meditation on beauty and Being, interrogating affinities between Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Virginia Woolf's philosophy of beauty and Being embodied in her oeuvre. It addresses beauty as a mode of being rather than a mere adornment of human existence.

This book is a study of the amorphous, fragmented and digressive world of G. G. Byron's poetic works, and the themes of mutability, deformation and transgression, referred to as madness. It analyses the author's conscious process of self-fashioning, narrative dis-orientation and the dismantling of cultural pre-conceptions.

The study examines the sartorial production of feminine identities in 20th-century Britain.Cognitive metaphor theory is applied to demostrate the importance of clothing in public assertion of gender identities.

This volume contains a selection of articles focussed on analysis and interpretation of Ali Smith's literary output. It aims to explore key areas of her work including language, identity, narrative structure and time.

The book focuses on the phenomenon of archaization in literary translation. It shows that archaization is closely linked with nostalgia, both phenomena betraying deep-seated affinities. Archaism, like nostalgia, eclectically and arbitrarily recreates the past, in accordance with dominant political and cultural agendas.

The book is a collection of essays in the language, literature and history of the broadly speaking Celtic world. By bringing together heterogeneous but at the same time fresh insights into diverse areas of Celtic scholarship, this volume aims to invite further research in the fields probed by the contributors in their chapters.

By close readings of poems and by theoretical analysis involving theology, philosophy and literary criticism, this collection of essays explores poetry's contribution to the expression of theological wonder, which can occur both in ordinary life and in the natural world, or can arise in the context of explicitly supernatural mystical experience.

The book studies the relations between time and visual technologies in the oeuvre of Thomas Pynchon within the framework of the culture and politics of time. By examining photography, cinema, tv, computers, and the Internet, it puts Pynchon's engagement with these technologies into a perspective that elucidates their workings as time machines.

The book attempts to cover the misunderstanding of the female characters in Edward Bond's plays. None of the criticism has developed specifically the role of these women as speakers of their social context. The reader will discover female spokeswomen of revolution, committed and suffering mothers but also the personification of evil and wickedness.

The book focuses on popular genres of romance, fantasy, science fiction, dystopia, thriller, and What-if historical fiction. It uses semiotics, structuralism and narratology to consider genre mixture, intertextuality, and world models. The author analyses among others the work of William Golding, Michel Faber, C. S. Lewis, and Michael Crichton.

This compilation of essays attempts to trace the reasons behind the ongoing popularity of crime fiction. It contains twenty-one original essays written by scholars and practitioners of crime fiction which discuss key concepts in crime fiction studies: generic diversity, the evolution of characters and the growing significance of space and place.

This book discusses the writings of three 20th-century American painters in the context of the historical discourse about inter-art analogies and rivalries. It presents Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley and Ad Reinhardt as true men of letters whose texts confirm the existence of a strong link between their painterly and writerly dispositions.

This discussion of Herbert's poetic sequence, The Temple, explores the connections between poetry, philosophy, and theology. It focuses on the inherent aporias of genuinely gratuitous gift and hospitality. It employs the concepts of the saturated phenomenon and the "dative subject".

This interdisciplinary study of the post-industrial American city examines the linkages between urban regeneration policies, citizenship, and social justice in the neoliberal city. It foregrounds social capital, community building, and sustainability as key discourses and practices of re-configuring and re-inhabiting the urban.

This book examines the role of parody in the English poetry and prose of the eighteenth century. It focuses on polyphony, intertextuality and deconstruction in parodic genres, in Alexander Pope's satires and John Gay's mock-pastoral poems. It examines the key role of parody in the novels by Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne.

This book addresses financial, social, historical, and cultural debt in postcolonial fiction. It examines how literary characters including servants, fallen women, and cultural outsiders pay or refuse to pay the debts imposed upon them, and includes direct comparisons between debt in fiction and current issues of debt in the economy world-wide.

The book demonstrates the thematic unity underlying Carter's fiction and non-fiction, highlighting their interdependence and demonstrating how her texts persistently examine existing theories of pleasure from many different angles. In this way, Carter's works enter into dialogue with numerous pleasure connoisseurs, theorists as well as writers.

This study looks at Chesterton's apology for Catholicism in the context of his epoch. It shows how he portrays Catholicism as English and universal at the same time and thus seeks to put an end to its isolation from England's mainstream culture.

The author analyses the multi-layered and multidimensional theme of identity construction recurring in Tony Harrison's work from the seventies onwards looking at the way it evolved throughout the years. The book examines identity as present in Harrison's verse in the frame of sociological and philosophical thought.

The book offers comparative analysis of diverse Darwinism-inspired discourses such as post-modern novels, science fiction, popular science and nature films. Special attention is paid to Darwin's problem with human ancestry, Darwinism and the humanities, and the lives of Charles and Emma Darwin as contemporary myths.

This collection of essays is devoted to the intersections of poetic speech, literary criticism, theology and philosophy. The emphasis falls on the connection between poetry and Logos, word and flesh in poetry from the seventeenth century to the present day.

The book looks at the uses of the ordinary in the short stories of T.F. Powys and V.S. Pritchett. It observes two models the theme is explored in: the violation (ekstasis), and the preservation (stasis). It explores the use of the theme in terms of: characterization, events, setting, narrativity, eventfulness, causality and narrative rhetoric.