Literary Criticism

The publication Places and Spaces of Crime in Popular Imagination is part of the Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English Series. The text reflects growing interest in popular literary genres not only among the readers, but mainly in literary research. This still rather under-researched area is now representing fertile grounds for various theoretical approaches. As the publication mainly declares its interest in crime-related genres, its focus on place is justifiable: it reflects the postmodern “spatial turn”, manifested in an increased emphasis on the location of crime, not necessarily in the sense of the crime scene itself, but as a socio-geographical place and space.
The setting of crime has a specific and well-defined role in the traditional crime genres, but this role has been redefined in the modern versions of crime-related fiction. ranging from educating the reader in certain areas, bringing up current problems, deepening the psychological aspect of individual characters etc. The published volume brings forth various aspects of this new role of place in popular genres centering on crime and gives space to its deeper analysis. It is not the researchers´ objective to provide overviews of the history of the theoretical discussion of place and space in literature in general. Instead, although the essays do employ a variety of critical approaches, the collection strives to show practically how place and space is employed in the specific material of the selected works.
The seven chapters are written by scholars from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. Two essays represent London as a topos and a chronotope in the works by contemporary British writers of crime fiction. The selection is to show how varied the literary London can be, albeit in the often rather formulaic popular genre. The essays also document a shift from the country setting typical for the British Golden Age of detective fiction to the more recent urban focus. One contribution focuses on the genre of spy novel to show how rendering of place and space can contribute to the genre’s typical atmosphere of suspense, secrets and disquiet. Four more essays analyze a variety of places and spaces in American crime fiction, crime comics and crime film. All of the places are in some way specific to American milieu – the suburbia, the university campus, the wilderness, a holiday resort with a state park. These essays are designed to show the contemporary variety of places where crime literature (or film) is set and to document a shift from the traditional urban setting of American hard-boiled fiction to a far greater recent diversity.
The volume brings together most recent central European research on the topic of place and community in popular imagination. Thus, it represents a unique insight into this growing phenomenon, which can no longer be overlooked by the academic community.

Faces of Crisis in 20th-and 21st-Century Prose. An Anthology of Criticism offers a unique overview of the motif of crisis tackled by 20th-and 21st-century novelists. In one way or another, crisis has always been an inevitable part of our lives and it is still a central aspect of the contemporary world, in which we are constantly inundated with information about economic, environmental, and health threats.


The anthology is divided into three parts pertaining to the main themes of the articles. The first section “Selves in Crisis” is concerned with personal and identity crisis. The second part “Bonds in Crisis” is devoted to interpersonal relationships and family ties. The third section “Worlds in Crisis” deals with threats on a global scale, both in the present and in the future. Focused on the main theme, literary scholars from different European universities tackle the problem of crisis from various perspectives, analysing works by authors such as James Joyce, Vita Sackville-West, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Daphne du Maurier, D.H. Lawrence, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Zoë Wicomb, Rachel Seiffert, Sarah Waters, Diane Setterfield, Boualem Sansal, Philip K. Dick, and Suketu Mehta.


The anthology opens with the article “Literature as Crisis” written by Dr Richard Brown from the University of Leeds, UK. Other articles are authored by young scholars representing universities both in Poland and abroad.

Romantic writers often asserted their individuality, but this assertion tended to take the form of positioning themselves in relation to other authors and literary texts. Thus they implicitly acknowledged the rich network of broadly understood poetic dialogue as an important and potent source for their own creativity. When in 1816 John Keats wrote “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” he celebrated the originality of his contemporaries and the historical significance of his times, pointing to deep interest in “the hum of mighty works” in all the fields of human activity, to which “the nations” ought to listen. Keats’s sonnet suggests not only stimulating exchanges between poets, artists and social thinkers in the same language, but also the idea of transnational appreciation and dialogue.
The volume takes up this idea and explores the dialogues of Romantic authors within the wide scope of European and American cultures. Essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Bulgaria, Poland, Canada and the United States of America examine Romantic writers’ responses to their contemporaries, explore their dialogues with the culture of the past, and their interactions across the arts and sciences. They also scrutinize the Romantics’ far-reaching influence on later writers and artists, and thus extend the network of artistic exchange to modern times. The volume offers a rich tapestry of interconnections that span across time and space, interlace languages and cultures, and link Romantic writers and artists with their predecessors and successors across Europe and America. The essays in the collection invite the reader to join ongoing dialogues between writers and their audiences, of the past and present.

This book presents a critical study of five poetry collections by the Iraqi poet Hatif Janabi (Hātif Janābī): Farādīs, ayā’il wa ‘asākir (Paradises, Deer, and Soldiers, four poetry collections in one, Damascus 1998), Raġba bayna ġaymatayn (A Desire Between Two Clouds, Beirut 2009), Maw‘id ma‘a šafrat as-sikkīn (An Appointment with a Knife’s Blade, Beirut 2012), Iḏā daẖalta baytanā fa-satuqabbil qadamayka al-‘ataba (If You Enter Our Home, the Threshold Will Kiss Your Feet, Baghdad 2014), and Walīmat al-asmāk (Fish Banquet, Baghdad 2017). This study seeks to address essential aspects of Janabi’s poetry, related to its ideational and philosophical contents, focusing on the multiple joints upon which the texts are based, and which are major milestones of the poet’s imaginative world.

The book focuses on the use of confessional mode in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Ihara Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman, two works of fiction, which, although written in two different cultural contexts, bear a number of narrative similarities. Both works attempt to create trustworthy narrators and use realistic techniques of depiction while focusing on details and enumerating tangible objects. Both describe vividly and colourfully the milieu and the characters while embracing the contradictions of life and personality. Finally, both use a mode of confession, displaying 'what occurs in the individual mind under the impact of the temporal flux,' which is a principle characteristic of the modern novel (Watt 22).The author delineates the development of narrative fiction in Japan and England (Chapter I), analyses the role of confession (or revelation) in the literary and cultural traditions of the two countries (Chapter II&III), and considers various intricacies of using confession as a narrative strategy in fiction (Chapter IV). The revelation of the narrators' past is accompanied by their conscious concealment of various details and by means of withholding certain information they succeed in attracting the attention of the audience and preparing a suitable setting for disclosure. Moreover, although Moll Flanders and the Amorous Woman, both experienced and advanced in years, yet sometimes showing naivety and ignorance characteristic of their childhood and youth, speak from the distance of time and place, they are entirely absorbed in their stories, frequently using the praesens historicum to emphasise the immediacy of what they narrate. The terms "novel" and "confession" are used in the book as broad categories, which enable – although not without reservations – a comparative reading of two works coming from two different backgrounds. The attempts to define the labels in the literary, historical and biographical contexts bring to the forefront not only the narrative traditions in England and Japan but also the present-day understanding of what the modern novel is.

The volume consists of 6 parts devoted to literature, languages, history, culture, science, religions and philosophy of the Eastern World. Its aim is to portray the present-day state of oriental studies, which are here understood predominantly as philologies of Asia and Africa, but also as a field of study including other, adjacent disciplines of the humanities, not neglecting the history of oriental research. The book’s multidisciplinary content reflects the multi- and often interdisciplinary nature of Oriental studies today. Part 1 (Literature) offers new insights into belles-lettres written in Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Urdu, Persian and Japanese. Part 2 (Linguistics) contains studies on Sanskrit texts (in a stylometric approach), Japanese nominals, Japanese poetry as a linguistic source, Arabic translations of the Bible, Arabic dialect of Morocco, Arabic culinary terms of Persian origin and Turkish vocabulary of the language reform era. Part 3 (History) investigates Napoleon’s campaign in the Middle East, Middle Eastern-Russian relations in the 18th century, the history of Seljuk Empire and the works of a Moroccan historian, Ǧaʿfar Ibn Aḥmad an-Nāṣīrī as-Salawī. Part 4 (History of oriental studies) deals with the history of Oriental studies in Kraków and with the problems of a critical edition of the Quran. Part 5 (Culture and Science) examines the artistic achievements of Egyptian moviemaker Yūsuf Šahῑn and possible influence of the Muslim science on medieval Polish scholars. Part 6 (Religion and Philosophy) explores some philosophical concepts of the Confucian ethics and the contribution of Karīma Bint Aḥmad Al-Marwaziyya to preservation and transmission of some religious traditions of Islam.

Drama of the Mind presents selected papers from Beckett in Kraków 2006 conference held by the English Department of the Jagiellonian University in November 2006.

The book discusses selected works of literature written in Great Britain in the final decades of the twentieth century in the context of contemporary debates on English national and cultural identity. Its main goal is to investigate how writers discussed in the book, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, and Adam Thorpe, address the issue of Englishness and to examine how they revisit its traditional formulations. Literary works by Ackroyd, Barnes, and Thorpe are discussed in the context of philosophy of history, spatial definitions of Englishness founded upon the myth of Green England, the tradition of the pastoral novel, and the discourse of the picturesque. Literary approaches to these issues are confronted with prevailing discourses of Englishness that in the late twentieth century were being both reinforced and questioned from different positions, as well as addressed by the authors in questions in their novels and polemical texts.

The present book, entitled Modern Literature of the United Arab Emirates is aimed at filling the gap within academic knowledge on Emirate literature. The author hopes the current publication will bring closer to the Arab and non-Arab recipient the exceptionally interesting and original, though extremely recent, panorama of Emirati literary life. The source material dealt with has been enriched by biographical information on the authors as well as a bibliography of their works, which portrays the broad creative context of contemporary Emirati men of letters.

Literature in Yiddish has an almost millennium-long history. A major, if not the definitive caesura in its evolution was the outbreak of World War II, during which, of the approximately 11 million Jews who used Yiddish in their day-to-day affairs, over half perished. Yiddish literature emerged from the war severely crippled, weakened by the deaths of its writers and readers. But for many years after the war those who survived made immense efforts, in various places across the globe, to revive and foster culture in their mother tongue. After the Holocaust the major centers of literary life shifted to Western Europe, the United States, and Israel. It is widely believed that, outside the Soviet Union, there was little activity in Eastern Europe after the war. But in Poland there was a small though burgeoning and very dynamic center of Jewish life. The community that was building it consisted of the handful of people who had miraculously survived the Holocaust in Poland, and the far larger group of those who had seen the war out in the USSR. It is the literary output of this community of survivors, created and/or published in post-war Poland to 1968, that is the subject of analysis in this work.

The essays collected in the present volume are the result of a long-term project. An international group of scholars addressed questions connected with the relation of the changing concepts of history and the status of history in Shakespearean plays in reading and in actual representation on the stage. Especially interesting aspects of the research deal with the transposition of the time and place of Shakespeare's plays to the time and place of their reception within the context of historical awareness; equally fascinating are the studies which up the perspectives of the medieval and Renaissance contexts. Memory and how in operates (or how we operate it) turns out to be an indispensable complement to the research on the literary and dramatic representation of history. The variety of problems and aspects tackled here opens up interesting insights into the diversity of experience of and reflection on history and representation of history in Shakespeare's plays.

A reader of the epyllion by Dracontius, the elegy by Maximianus, and the epigram by Luxorius should not expect that these works—and these new embodiments of the 'old' genres—will be wholly identical with their 'archetypes'. Were it so, it would mean that we read but second-rate versifiers, indeed.

We may expect rather that thanks to the reading of Dracontius's epyllion, Maximianus's elegy, and Luxorius's epigram our understanding of these very genres may become fuller and deeper than if it was narrowed only to the study of the 'classical phase' of the Roman literature.

Therefore, I have decided to employ in the title of my book the expression genres rediscovered. I have found it fair to emphasize that the poets whose works have been studied here merit appreciation for their creativity, and indeed courage, in reusing and reinterpreting the classical—and truly classic—literary heritage. In addition, I have found it similarly fair to stress that for the students of Latin literature the borderline between the 'classical' and the 'post-classical' is, and should be, flexible. It is not my intention of course to imply that aesthetic and poetological differences should be ignored or blurred. Quite the reverse, these differences are profound and multidimensional and as such must be properly understood and explained. The main issue is the fact that studies of Latin literature—or rather of literature in general – and especially generic studies require a proper, i.e. diachronic, perspective. A description of a certain genre based merely on its most important or generally known representative/representatives will always risk becoming incomplete and limited. In genology, one must be utterly prudent in defining the 'main' and the 'marginal', the 'relevant' and the 'negligible'. In this sense, an insight into a few genres practiced by some 'classical'—and classic—Roman poets from the perspective of their 'post-classical' followers may be, also for a genologist, an intriguing rediscovery.

Anniversary book dedicated to Stanislaw Stachowski on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

The work presents – as far as is now possible – the language spoken by Lutsk Karaims in the second half of the 19th and in the first two decades of the 20th centuries. This is attempted by means of editing eleven private letters and five open letters written in Lutsk Karaim – with Hebrew interpolations. The letters were written by different authors in Hebrew script.The present publication appears to be the first critical edition of this type of text written in this particular dialect. Previous editions of south-western Karaim manuscripts either concerned very short texts from Halych or were prepared with no intention of being professional.The linguistic description of the texts aims to present a grammar of the manuscripts' language. It is complemented with a separate chapter dealing with the Slavonic structural influences exerted on the authors' idiolects, and with the lexicon of the texts. A separate part deals with the orthography and the features of the writing itself. The transcription and translation of each manuscript are preceded with a concise palaeographic description and a summary of the content. The work closes with a glossary, several indexes, maps, and the facsimile of the manuscripts.

The analysis of a selection of Emily Dickinson's texts confirms the notion that suffering occupies the principal position in the poet's work. Her poetry constitutes an example of a painful literary quest for subjectivity as well as an act of self-transcendence, which means that through her writing the poet obtained conscious control over her personal anguish. By using pain as a poetic strategy she transformed her private biography into a literary text. In this way she became a model for coping with suffering and using it for self-examination and self-development. In Emily Dickinson's poems suffering creates a new language and a new outlook on the self and the world. During the investigation of her poetic texts three dimensions of suffering as a poetic strategy have been distinguished: suffering as a theme, suffering as a subversive force affecting the language, and suffering as a form of poetic expression. The critical tool used for this analysis was the theory of Julia Kristeva, who emphasises these elements as crucial in the interpretation of literary texts.

The healing power of Emily Dickinson's poetry lies in her presenting that suffering also has the positive, empowering side. By displaying an astounding autonomy and showing an alternative way of existence the poet demonstrated that fulfilment can be understood in a very broad sense. Her poetry constitutes evidence that the creative processes can be used as psychotherapy for both the creator and the recipient.

This book is a collection of articles written for Professor Marta Gibinska by her colleagues and friends, from universities both in Poland and abroad. The texts presented in this volume cover a wide spectrum of topics. Part I, devoted to Shakespeare, comprises wide-ranging work from renowned specialists in the field: studies on historical background, sources, theatrical, screen and literary reception, as well as translation. Part II contains articles which deal with multiple authors, genres and perspectives, but are uniformly passionate and insightful.The title Eyes to Wonder, Tongue to Praise, a poetic phrase borrowed from Shakespeare, conveys what seems to be a defining quality of both the contributors to this volume and its recipient: namely, the ability to translate keen appreciation of literature not into speechless awe but eloquent praise, combined with the generosity to share it with others.

These twelve essays examine the exchange between literature and the visual arts (mainly painting), which, since the turn of the nineteenth century, has gained prominence in literary criticism. Reading modern and postmodern texts, the authors consider literary works next to the artworks the poets and writers invoke. Such instances of artistic synthesis highlight evolving perspectives on art and literature and the expressive possibilities offered by the simultaneity of words and images.

Among many types of life-writing genres that recently have not only become central to contemporary academic discourse, but also attracted wide readership, the biographical novel deserves special attention. Authors on Authors examines biographical-novel-about-a-writer--a sub-genre of biographical novel which takes a real writer and his/her life story as the subject matter for imaginative exploration. The study identifies all the major examples of the genre written in English between 1990 and 2010, while discussing a variety of approaches and methods used by contemporary authors in rewriting the lives of other authors. An original taxonomy of the genre based on Gerard Genette's Palimpsests is introduced in this work, following a claim that life and, consequently, life-writing are derivational practices and as such are inherently intertextual and ontologically palimpsestuous. Seen as the most representative and accomplished achievements of the genre, four specific attempts at a biographical-novel-about-a-writer (Author, Author by David Lodge, The Master by Colm Tóibín, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, and The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee) are singled out for an in-depth analysis in this multi-dimensional study which works dialectically across the borders of history, biography, literary criticism, philosophy, and textual analysis.

History, memory and trauma as well as their complex interrelations have been lying at the centre of interdisciplinary academic debates since the end of the previous century. These are also themes with which contemporary writers and other artists are increasingly preoccupied in their work. History, Memory, Trauma in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction is an attempt at analysing the relationship between history, memory and trauma in the selected novels of Pat Barker, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro and John Banville. The author examines the notion of memory in a variety of contexts: collective memory in the historical novels of Barker and Barry, individual memory as a foundation of the sense of self in the novels of Banville and Ishiguro, and traumatic memory in the novels of Barry and Ishiguro. By applying the theoretical framework of trauma studies to the work of those renowned writers, History, Memory, Trauma offers new interpretations of their novels. The author demonstrates that contemporary fiction moves beyond mere representation of trauma and engages the reader in the role of co-witness who enables the process of working through trauma.

This volume raises provocative questions about the status of words and literature in contemporary culture. It argues that words and images are equal and that the vast number of text messages, e-mails, tweets, comments, blogs, and daily social network posts confirms textuality's central role in new media. This is especially true of writing, as old and new forms mix online and off, reconfiguring so prolifically that no single theory can explain it, let alone project its future. This volume explores multiple questions in depth: are microblogs a new literary genre? What happens when Japanese haiku crosses cultures? Is writing still an act of individuality or has it become a modern technological innovation?

This volume shows the panorama of the contemporary studies of the Polish Renaissance, presented here in the Italian and transalpine context, taking into consideration its characteristics. An important aspect of this volume is the specification of the research needs and the definition of new directions of studies and their methodology. A large, multiethnic and multireligious state, which was Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów) shaped its modern identity in the sixteenth century. This period gave rise to the flowering of literature and art, creating the Golden Age of Polish culture. The ideas of Renaissance humanism proved to be vitally attractive for the domestic elites and contributed to the creation of the foundations of the political system of the Commonwealth, becoming its pride—a republic with an elected king, where both passive and active electoral rights were vested in the entire Gentry Nation. The Latin Culture of the Renaissance became also an integrating factor for this multilingual state organism, and Latin, together with Polish was the main medium of communication among nobility (who accounted for about 10 percent of the inhabitants of the Republic).

The disintegration of this commonwealth, the loss of independence for more than a century (1795-1918), and then loss of sovereignty for another half of a century (1939-1989) and then isolation between Poland and the West resulted in the fact that the culture of this area was not included in the studies of the European Renaissance, which were commenced in the nineteenth century. This gap has been seen until today in the Western course books and more general overviews. The purpose of this volume is, at least to a limited degree, to fill in the lack of scientific analyses of the Polish Renaissance in western languages and also to invite foreign scholars to a debate about Polish humanistic literature.

Particular chapters concentrate on the following issues: From the History of the Renaissance Idea; The State of Research on the Renaissance Humanism: Poland Case; Editing of Primary Sources; Old and Contemporary Translation Studies; The Renaissance Genres (Theory and Practice).

In contrast to the notion of trust, which has become popular as a social phenomenon in the social sciences of late, the notion of mistrust is mostly overlooked. If at all, mistrust is investigated as the flip side of trust, as an annoying absence and a societal failure. The most pressing question always seems to be how to restore trust in the state, as well as how to foster trust in civil agents and free markets. The contributors intend to take a step back and explore what people actually do when they mistrust. Particular attention is paid to how mistrust relates to detachment, suspicion, and doubt as well as to social complexity.

This book is an attempt to diagnose the condition of (post-)modern comparative literature and to formulate its role in the media society in a multicultural world. Andrzej Hejmej reviews the current situation of an “indiscipline” in the widest possible perspective, taking into account both the first concepts from the nineteenth century, including proposals from the French comparative literary scholars, Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, and the institutional work of H. Von Meltzl, as well as the latest concepts from the comparative literary scholars from Western Europe and the U.S.

The history of the formation of the main trends of comparative literary studies is explained through the use of metaphors: the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center, and the Tower of Babel. Tackling a variety of proposals from comparative literature scholars as well as proposals from researchers into intermedial and intercultural phenomena leads us to a new look at comparative literature and comparative literary studies. As a result, Hejmej understands modern comparative literature not so much as a further extension of the institutional dimension but more as an interpretative practice embedded in everyday life. This intercultural perspective opens new horizons for comparative literary studies in the twenty-first century.

Everyday articulations of music, place, urban politics, and inclusion/exclusion are powerfully present in Istanbul. This volume analyzes landscapes of music, community, and exclusion across a century and a half. An interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists presents four case studies: the rembetika, the music of the Asiks, the Zakir/Alevi tradition, and hip-hop in Beyoglu, Üsküdar, the gentrifying Sulukule neighborhood, and across the metropolis.

This book discusses the concept of liberature, a term coined by the Polish poet Zenon Fajfer in 1999 to refer to a kind of writing that fuses text with its material form into a conceptual whole in the space of the book. In her monograph, described by the author as "the fruit of miscegenation between a scholar and a creative writer," Katarzyna Bazarnik explains how liberature is indebted to modernist explorations of the materiality of writing pointed out by Jerome McGann, as well as practices of "presentification" described by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. She flags affinities between liberature and related concepts: N. Katherine Hayles's technotexts, Jessica Pressman's bookishness, Lori Emerson's reading-writing interfaces, and Alison Gibbons's analyses of multimodal literature. Finally, reading liberature through contemporary genre theory, she proposes to see it as a multimodal, literary genre bound to the architecture of the material book.

How can literature respond to a monumental event, unprecedented historically, politically, and culturally, whose memory will forever be inseparable from its mass media coverage? How can writers represent what Jean Baudrillard called an "image-event"? In particular, what form can they use to convey the unspeakable - that was at the same time broadcasted live across the globe? These questions are central to Ewa Kowal's comparative study of thirteen early post-9/11 novels. Written in four different Western countries between 2003 and 2007, during the now historical time of George W. Bush's "war on terror," the selected works provide the earliest literary reactions to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and/or their aftermath. Kowal examines them in a wider cultural context, focusing especially on audio-visual media, motifs of childhood and magical thinking as well as the destabilised division into reality and fiction. Offering an original reading of the whole body of work, the author places each analysed book on a scale according to its closeness to a terrorist attack, revealing a correspondence between the distance from the tragedy, the levels of danger and risk taken, and the degree of formal (un)conventionality.