Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Literatures – serie

This volume explores the notions of excess, intemperance and overabundance in cultures and literatures of both the English- and Chinese-speaking worlds. It concentrates on some aspects of literary and cultural meanings of excess(es) in various theories and practices of these antipodean territories of human experience and consciousnesses, bringing together what is common between them and what sets the West apart from the East: eroticism, drug abuse, alcoholism, urban concepts, music, food, etc. In times of a serious crisis of Western-style capitalism, growing consumerism and the collapse of traditional values, the eyes of the world are now turned to the East, seeking solutions in China, Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong for what may come as Eastern-style neopostmodernism.

The application of postcolonial theories to Irish literature remains a contentious issue. Unlike other colonised nations, Ireland shared a long history of political, economic and artistic ties with its empire-building neighbour, Britain. Yet the Irish response to the project of British imperialism bears comparison with postcolonial models of the relationship between colonisers and the colonised. Writing from the Margins of Europe assesses the potential for postcolonial analysis of works by W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and James Joyce. In this exploration of postcolonial parallels between these writers, the author focuses on four core issues: historiography, nationalism, language and displacement.

This book closely examines the processes governing the construction of literary spaces in the selected works of J.M. Coetzee, focusing in particular on the writer’s subversive and destructive treatment of traditional modes of representation which participated in the imperial enterprise and served to overcome the ontological insecurity of colonisers. This strategy results in the formation of heterogenous, fluid and open locations which can be deciphered along the postmodern spatial theories of Foucault, Augé, Deleuze and Guattari. The transformation of topographies not only cleanses them of the conventional residue in preparation for alternative spatial rearrangements, but also initiates processes which reverse the colonising project by breaching the gap between the other and the self.

Collected under the theme of Visions and Revisions, the papers included in this volume examine different aspects of literature and culture of the Anglophone world. The first part gathers articles dealing with poetry of such epochs as the seventeenth century, the Victorian era and the modern times. Part two focuses on prose works representing such conventions and modes as the romance, the Gothic novel, the condition of England novel, Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction, the science fiction novel and gay fiction. Part three concerns various aspects of British and American culture, including the new media, drama and journalism, and advertising. In its diversity the volume reflects the dynamics of change in literature and culture, enabling the readers to investigate the multifaceted canon.

This book analyses representations of East Asia, mainly China and Japan, in selected Anglophone novels and films. Starting with the earliest texts and accounts, the first two chapters explore wider historical and cultural contexts of the mutual influences between the cultures of the East and West. The subsequent three chapters discuss symptomatic examples of contemporary Anglophone films and novels and seek to show how various cultural flows have continued to mould Western images of East Asia. The book focuses on narratives that highlight Western subjects transforming or becoming reinvigorated under the East Asian influence and explores such issues as the impact of East Asian martial arts and religious practices on Western masculinities, East Asian motifs in utopian and dystopian fiction, and contemporary depictions of Asian-Western romantic relationships.

The essays of this collection are, each in their own way, an attempt to address the centrality of emotions in literary and cultural production in a variety of genres, from medieval moralities to contemporary novels, from English Romanticism to film studies. Emotions are understood as mobile forms or forces, crossing between subjects and locations. The interdisciplinary and diverse nature of this collection reflects the view that emotions are interpersonal and forever slipping beyond our grasp. Yet, in thinking about emotion, we discover unexpected confluences. The contributions in this volume are grouped in five areas which reflect larger categories and provide a valid platform for interpretation of emotions: dynamics of modern culture, history, social sciences, interpersonal contexts, and imagination.