Gdansk Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture – serie

The book is a study of the most recent American fiction, published at the turn of the 21th century, which demonstrates a renewed interest in the matters of history. Using the concepts of memory and experience, the author points at the ways in which subjective history has been created in the new «novel about history», written by such authors as William Gass, Richard Powers, Marilynne Robinson, Nicholson Baker, Aleksandar Hemon, and Jeffrey Eugenides. Theoretically, the study has been inspired by the works of Aleida Assmann, Hayden White, Reinhart Koselleck, Frank Ankersmit, and Dominick LaCapra.

Byron’s mannerist digressive style and his ‘theatricality’ are a method of literary and cultural discourse based on the concepts of irony, paradox and reflectivity that were practised in seventeenth-century literature and culture. This results in the discursive split in the poetic language, which prefers to speak about the heavenly and the divine by reference to deformity and monstrosity. It is marked in a Romantic manner by the presence of the lyrical persona with a deep consciousness of previous literary texts based on the philosophy of this type of discourse, in which voices are echoed against each other. If we accept the Baroque, and seventeenth-century literature and culture, as sources of Byron’s literary dialogue with cultural tradition, we may cease to perceive the writer as an author suspended between two mutually exclusive interpretational systems, either as the liberal satirist or as the grandiose gothic seducer.

This volume comprises a collection of essays by Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarussian, and American scholars in the fields of American Studies, literary history, art history, and political science. It is focused on the topic of experience as a concept related to the United States and analyses US history, literature, film, art, politics, and society. The essays deal with a wide range of problems and types of representation, from experience as a component of various theoretical discourses through the experience of foreign visitors and recent immigrants for whom America has often been a place of the Other. The volume once again proves that experience has been one of the key categories of American cultural self-understanding.

Crime Scenes: Modern Crime Fiction in an International Context examines the ways in which crime fiction has developed over several decades and in several national literary traditions. The volume covers a wide spectrum of current interests and topical concerns in the field of crime fiction studies. It introduces twenty-four original essays by an international group of scholars divided among three main sections: «Genres», «Authors and Texts» and «Topics». Issues discussed include genre syncretism, intertextuality, sexuality and gender, nationhood and globalization, postcolonial literature and ethical aspects of crime fiction.

This volume of essays examines the relationship between eating and crisis. The United States’ long-lasting economic and cultural hegemony raises a number of questions: Has America been – literally and metaphorically – eating, appropriating, exploiting, and molding the world in its own image, or has it been eaten, appropriated, and exploited as a (frequently criticized or disdained) source of ideas, ideology, and knowledge? What is the relation between the current ecological crisis and America’s consumerist economy, with its practices of food production and consumption, and its use of natural resources? What is America’s role in the ongoing crisis of modernity? And, if the crisis continues, where are the sources of sustenance?

This book identifies a corpus of British and Polish texts that share correspondences with reference to the themes of feminine doubling, the difficulty of asserting feminine subjectivity, sexual mother-figures and symbolic father-figures. It draws on the Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and the French feminist uses of it known as écriture féminine – the theories of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. It also introduces the theories of the forgotten Russian-Jewish psychoanalyst, Sabina Spielrein. The first part of the book takes account of specifics of Polish culture and history that made women writers marginalised within this context. In the second part, it closely and comparatively examines the selected British and Polish texts, while giving voice to the unknown, stereotyped, or forgotten Polish works. The innovative features of the book include its comparative character and the implementation of various psychoanalytical approaches to the Polish texts.