This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on intertextual transactions in classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1992 and 2005. The book opens with a theoretical essay and proceeds with individual analyses of the interrelatedness, overlappings, entanglements, and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Paul Auster and Herman Melville – Henry Adams, Frank R. Stockton and Thomas Pynchon – Donald Barthelme and James Joyce – James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino. The chapters lend themselves to being read in any order, selectively, and in isolation. Given a literal perspective by incongruity, however, the Joycean premise of the book is that a commodius vicus of recirculation (type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward) may bring the reader in any case (back) to the beginning.
