Bøker i Dis/Continuities-serien

The book offers an intercultural perspective on the work of Alice Munro, the Canadian 2013 Nobel Laureate in Literature. The texts are divided into reminiscences, literary interpretations, film and stage adaptations and comparative analyses. The contributors are academics and writers from Canada, Poland and France.

Within the past decades, nostalgia has become a misleadingly familiar concept. Whereas popular nostalgia connotes an idealised memory of the past, nost/algia implies a novelty of approach by focusing on the distinction between ¿nostos¿ (the return) and ¿algos¿ (the pain). Discussed with a reference to the pastoral and the Odyssey, the present study examines certain ¿complex¿ deployments of the mode as applied in several autobiographical narratives of two ex-patriate writers, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. The book first traces the history and theory of autobiography and nostalgia. Second, it interprets the nostalgic tensions as complex structures of thought which prompt certain inferences about the writers¿ respective attitudes towards the world and their inner selves.

This feminist study of Brian Moore's five novels with eponymous heroines compares Moore's female characters to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, women in Victorian and modernist fiction, and women in the works of Canadian female writers. The book discusses Moore's biblical and film inspirations.

Twelve papers presented at the international Conference ACED Religion and Spirituality in Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Bucharest, Romania, in June 2015, construct a case for the expression in literature of direct and indirect ways of remaining faithful to Christianity. Modern theologians and writers are placed face to face.

Examining the transfer of the Gothic to Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, this book focuses on the influence of Ann Radcliffe on the oeuvre of Anna Mostowska. It helps to redraw the map of early Gothic by providing new insights into our understanding of its European dissemination.

The science of language evolution appeared at the end of the last century but topically belongs to language origins - the domain of investigation concerned with the beginnings and diversification of language. This book documents the whole history of language origins and situate language evolution in this wide intellectual context.

The book offers a collection of papers that, taken jointly, serve to show the academic potential of English Studies. The chapters, which give a cross section of research in English literature, linguistics, language teaching and translation studies, testify to a topical and disciplinary expansion of the core philological lines of research.

The main purpose of this volume is to look into a wide spectrum of artistic ventures which provoke, challenge habitual thinking, and cross boundaries. The essays offer a truly interdisciplinary perspective and deal with creative acts of transgression from a broad range of fields: literature, theatre, visual art, film, and others.

Discussing the ancient notion of ekphrasis, this study examines the interpenetration of literary and non-literary art. The author demonstrates how ekphrasis is useful for reading contemporary novels that feature non-representative, conceptual works of art by taking a close look at the works of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and Tom McCarthy.

Working from an analysis of the philosophical assumptions of the cognitivist perspective, this book unpacks an argument for considering concepts as correlates of lexical labels - for a maximally productive understanding of the relation between concepts, categories, categorisation, and their theoretical models.

The volume discusses domestication and foreignization in Polish-English and English-Polish translation. The case studies are based on research projects by graduates of the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland.

Language evolution is a science which studies the origins and diversification of language. This book is an introduction to the topic and is addressed to audiences who are not professionally involved in the study of language evolution.

The present volume on Henry James's life and work consists of five parts devoted to various forms and aspects of conflict. Apart from addressing James's attitude to two major conflicts, the Civil War and World War One, the articles range from critical discussions of James's biography, criticism, and fiction.

The study deals with human community and its relation with the individual. It takes recourse to the notions of friendship, moral respect and solidarity which allow for the extension of the notion of community above the limitations of the human sphere and takes up Thoreau's work as early and prophetic diagnosis of the modern crisis of relationships.

The study demonstrates that the reading of nineteenth-century sea novels through the lens of twentieth-century theories, regarded as variations on the concept of mimesis, may lead to re-evaluation of the long forgotten texts, which proved inspiring to some of the most prominent nautical writers, among others Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville.

The volume explores the ways in which the Great War has been remembered and imaged in various local accounts. It offers critical analyses and original interpretations of forgotten historical records, letters, literary works and cultural artifacts.

This study explores non-fiction of Henry James (1843-1916), including literary criticism, biographies, and autobiographies, while also interrogating the traditional formula of literary auto/biography. It attempts to piece together an image of James as a subject and object of biographical and autobiographical endeavors, including portraiture.

Explores selected relations between visual and verbal aspects of film, drama, literature and biography. In this book, the chapters deals with such areas as film adaptations, remakes, ekphrasis, photography and the novel, feminist rewritings, acts of iconoclasm in postcolonial drama, and biographical studies.

The book addresses the problem of literary value in North American literature, children's literature, film, and poetry. First it focuses on institutions which are instrumental in attributing value to literature: literary critics and award givers. It juxtaposes scholarly pursuits with cinematic praxis, and cinematic praxis with political activity.

This book is an introduction to the history, aesthetic and key themes of the Gothic and the approaches and theories that have been applied to Gothic texts and films. The volume explores the cultural resonances created by the genre in 18th and 19th century texts and 20th century literature and film.

This book offers a collection of essays in literary and cultural studies. The articles explore a wide range of distinct problems and texts with the aim to question the already known and to interrogate the realms of ethics, literature, history and cultural identities.