Mirosława Buchholtz - Böcker

Henry James’ Travel: Fiction and Non-Fiction offers a multifaceted approach to Henry James’ idea and practice of travel from the perspective of the globalized world today. Each chapter addresses a different selection of James’ fiction and non-fiction and offers a different approach towards the ideas that are still with us today: history reflected in art and architecture, the tourist gaze, museum culture, transnationalism, and the return home. As a whole, the book encompasses both early and late fiction and non-fiction by Henry James, giving the reader a sense of how his idea of travel evolved over several decades of his creative activity and shows how thin the line between fiction and non-fiction travel writing really is.

Henry James’ Travel: Fiction and Non-Fiction offers a multifaceted approach to Henry James’ idea and practice of travel from the perspective of the globalized world today. Each chapter addresses a different selection of James’ fiction and non-fiction and offers a different approach towards the ideas that are still with us today: history reflected in art and architecture, the tourist gaze, museum culture, transnationalism, and the return home. As a whole, the book encompasses both early and late fiction and non-fiction by Henry James, giving the reader a sense of how his idea of travel evolved over several decades of his creative activity and shows how thin the line between fiction and non-fiction travel writing really is.

The book offers an innovative approach to the study of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction and biography. Section Two focuses on the achievement of Bronislaw Zielinski, Hemingway’s Polish translator and friend, who is hardly known outside Poland.

The book offers an innovative approach to the study of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction and biography. Section Two focuses on the achievement of Bronislaw Zielinski, Hemingway’s Polish translator and friend, who is hardly known outside Poland.

The book offers a new approach to the study of Alice Munro's fiction. Part Three consists of an essay on didactic aspects of Munro's fiction and of several interviews with teachers of Canadian literature who have included stories by Munro in their syllabi.

Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839), James F. Cooper’s The Red Rover (1828) and Richard H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) may be regarded as simulacra of reality imitating the then extremely popular literary conventions of the Gothic sea novel, the nautical romance and the sea diary, respectively. However, informed by René Girard’s model of mimetic desire, Luigi Pirandello’s theory of mimetic form and Meyer H. Abrams’ metaphor of «mimetic mirror», the analysis proves that the explored texts combine mimesis with creatio, that is the reproduction of maritime experience with the representation of general truths concerning human existence. Thus, the study demonstrates that the reading of the selected 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.

Within the past decades, Henry James has been seen going to the movies and to Paris, both far more likely destinations for him than battlefields of the modern world. Sending him off to war seems to be a preposterous idea, but the exaggeration inscribed in the title of the present volume is meant to stress the historicity of wars and battles underlying James’s life and work, quite apart from conflict on which literature thrives at all times. The book consists of five parts devoted to various forms and aspects of conflict. It deals with both literal and metaphorical battles of which the author was aware or in which he was involved. 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, to studies of the intertextual connections between his œuvre and works of both past and present authors.

The volume explores the ways in which the Great War has been remembered and imaged in various local accounts. It provides careful readings of a wide range of sources: letters exchanged by Henry James and Burgess Noakes, spoken accounts of the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, historical documents concerning Eastern Europe and the United States, travel writings by Fritz Wertheimer, Hermann Struck, and Herbert Eulenberg, literary texts by Lord Dunsany, Miroslav Krleža, and Gustav Meyrink, theater performances in Italy and Ireland and visual arts: masks for facially disfigured soldiers made by Francis Derwent Wood and Anna Coleman Ladd.

Canadian writer Alice Munro is the 2013 Nobel Laureate in Literature. This collection of essays by authors from Poland, Canada and France presents an intercultural perspective on her work and a new approach to Munro’s art of short story writing. It offers literary interpretation of the genre, critical perspectives on film and stage adaptations of her work, comparative analysis to the writings of Mavis Gallant and Eudora Welty, exclusive reminiscences of encounters with Alice Munro by Canadian writers Tomson Highway and Daphne Marlatt, and a unique African-Canadian perspective on Munro’s work by George Elliott Clarke.

The study of language becomes particularly attractive when it is not practised as an isolated descriptive enterprise, but when it has wide-ranging implications for the study of the human mind. Such is the spirit of this book. While categorisation may be the single most basic cognitive process in organisms, and as an area of inquiry, it is fundamental to Cognitive Science as a whole, at the other end of the spectrum, high-level cognition is organised and permeated by language, giving rise to categories that count and function as concepts. Working from considering the philosophical assumptions of the cognitivist perspective, this study offers an argument for a very productive understanding of the relation between concepts, categories, and their theoretical models.

This book fills the gap in research of the early stages of literary Gothicism and examines its transfer from England, via French, to Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The focus is on the oeuvre of Anna Mostowska, the first professional female writer of the Gothic in the region, and the extent to which it was shaped both by local literary tradition and political circumstances, and by Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe. This volume aims to redraw the maps of early Gothic by providing new insights into our understanding of the routes and meaning of its cross-cultural dissemination.

The science of language evolution appeared at the end of the last century but topically belongs to language origins – the domain of investigation that is concerned with the beginnings and diversification of language. Language evolution as a research area contrasts with the antiquity of language origins, which can be traced back to the earliest forms of traditional reflection. Language evolution emphasises its scientific orientation, whereas throughout most of its history language origins constituted a complex mixture of mythology, philosophy of language, as well as religiously and scientifically inspired speculation. This work is the first book-long attempt to document the whole history of language origins and situate language evolution in this wide intellectual context.

This feminist study is an innovative reassessment of Brian Moore’s five novels featuring eponymous heroines. The author reviews previous interpretations, exposing their sexist bias. Highlighting Moore’s empathetic insights, she also discusses the novelist’s limitations. She compares Moore’s heroines to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, reinterpreted by Mieke Bal, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina revisioned by Aritha van Herk, and to female characters created by Canadian women writers. Rejecting biocriticism, the study focuses on Moore’s biblical, Victorian and modernist inspirations, and his indebtedness to film. Ideas of female thinkers illuminate the condition of Moore’s female protagonists.

This book discusses the scope and development of the science of language evolution – a newly emergent field that investigates the origin of language. The book is addressed to audiences who are not professionally involved in science and presents the problems of language origins together with introductory information on such topics as the theory of evolution, elements of linguistic theory, the neural infrastructure of language or the signalling theory.