Old Challenges and New Horizons in English and American Studies

The volume is a collection of essays representative of the wide focus of research encouraged and coordinated by the Polish Association for the Study of English (member of ESSE). Articles selected for the volume deal with works of poetry, drama and prose written in English and invite the reader to view them in the context of intercultural and intertextual discourse. Authors discussed in the articles include: John Redford, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, James Macpherson, John Clare, Anna Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, George Gordon Byron, Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, T.F. Powys, Patrick White, Brian Friel, Brendan Behan, Philip Roth, Alice Walker, Chaim Potok, Ian McEwan, Kiran Desai, and Sarah Kane. In many of the essays the reader will notice a meta-discursive argument on the interplay between tradition and innovation in English studies.

Contents: Marcus Walsh: Understanding and Explaining the Literary Text: A Return to Interpretation - Jacek Wisniewski: Whose Clare? The Peasant Poet's Own Manuscript Versions of His Poems vs. Contemporaneous and Recent Editorial and Publishing Practice - Carl Tighe: Bible Knowledge and Multi-Cultural Society - Przemyslaw Uscinski: «This unpolish'd, rugged verse»: Epistemology in the Poetic Discourse of the Restoration - Anna Walczuk: Modernist Conflict or Fulfilment? The Poetry of T.S. Eliot - Katarzyna Blacharska: Byron's Cain: The Question of Voluntariness - Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun: Love and Knowledge: On Eroticising the Moral Message in John Redford's Wit and Science - Barry Keane: Singing Regrettable Necessities - The Staging of Brendan Behan in Poland - Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik: Tigers, Viragos and Whores: Constructions of Female Monstrosity in Early Modern England - Jadwiga Uchman: From William Shakespeare's Hamlet, through Stanislaw Wyspianski and Jan Kott, to Andrzej Wajda's Hamlet IV - Maciej Wieczorek: Cleansing the Readings: A Study of Egoism and Derangement in Sarah Kane's Cleansed - Joanna Zadarko: The Imposition of Power and Beliefs in Postcolonial Irish Drama: An Analysis of Brian Friel's Translations and Philadelphia, Here I Come! - Anna Bugajska: Scottish Ghosts, English Wraiths: The Supernatural Imagination of Macpherson and Tolkien - Malgorzata Holda: Aporia of Time in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and «Kew Gardens» in the Light of Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics - Aleksandra Kedzierska: Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol: «Such a Noble Meal» - Joanna Piwowarska: The Poetics of the English Gothic Novel in the Light of Mikhail Bakhtin's Theory - Joanna Wasiak: Literary Grotesque as a Therapy in G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. A Nightmare - Milosz Wojtyna: Exploding the Commonplace: T.F. Powys and the Short Story - Ryszard W. Wolny: Old Challenges and New Horizons: Reality and Imagination in Patrick White's Fiction as Exemplified by Voss (1957) and Riders In The Chariot (1961) - Malgorzata Drwal: Uncivilised Boer Women and a Gentlemen's War - British Imperial Discourse in Selected Instances of Boer Women's Life Writing from the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) - Anna Gawlikowska: The Slippery Slope of American Jewishness: Defining a Jewish Hero - Barbara Kijek: Exiles or Invaders? - Scottish and Acadian Diasporic Identities as Depicted in Contemporary Nova Scotian Literature - Irena Ksiezopolska: McEwan's Solar as a Comedy of Human Condition: On Hypocrisy, Global Warming and Plagiarism - Agnieszka Lobodziec: Womanist Transcendence of Racial and Gendered Nationalism and Universalism in Alice Walker's The Color Purple - Stankomir Nicieja: Orientalism Reoriented: Old Challenges and New Horizons for Edward Said's Critical Legacy - Anna Maria Tomczak: Old Notions, New Ideas: The Kitchen as a Locus Memoriae in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.