Liliana Sikorska

Leszek Drong

Ryszard Bartnik

These contributions offer fundamental insights into how literary works address and reconceptualize issues of nationalism, groupism, belonging and denationalization in selected European contexts. Various critical perspectives are employed here to highlight modern social and political processes as registered and, to a certain extent, also fashioned by contemporary literary discourses. ‘Reimagined communities’ emerge from literary redescriptions of existing or imaginary sociopolitical configurations in several European states or regions. All the contributions share a heightened sensitivity to the individual as enmeshed in oppressive geopolitical circumstances. Thereby, literary expressions of how individuality is constrained by social pressures may offer inspiring blueprints for emancipation.

Rewriting Nationalisms in European Literary Discourses

Reimagined Communities

In Plato's Symposium, Socrates says that the true poet must be tragic and comic at the same time, and the whole of human life must be felt as a blend of tragedy and comedy. The present collection of essays investigates the presence of comic and tragic elements in Irish literature. The works by Irish authors, be they classical or contemporary, capture the struggles of the lives of individuals and communities in Ireland. Irish literature in various ways deals with the tragic and complex past of the country, as well as an equally interesting present. The irony of the art is always subliminally filled with tragic overtones. Irish literature most commonly presents life's ironies as inseparably linked with the personal tragedies of the characters. In literature, life is sometimes described, sometimes reflected in a distorted mirror. In reality, just as Plato claims, Irish literature appears as a blend of tragedy and comedy.

Essays on Irish Literature

Ironies of Art/tragedies of Life

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction. Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the "Oriental obsession," stimulating dread and resentment, and even more strongly setting the Civilized West against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind – the World, the Flesh and the Devil – reappear in different contexts: the world of immigration, of white women desiring Muslim men, and the present-day "freedom fighters."

Other Encounters

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Readings of the Medieval Orient

Marcin Krygier

When the spiritual gift of leadership comes alive in churches everywhere, the church will become the hope of the world and a most influential force for good.

For the Loue of Inglis Lede

Literature in English is a term that has recently appeared to include both English literature in the traditional sense of the word and all the newly emerging literatures written and published in English whose authors may represent various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This series as well as our yearly Literature in English Symposium (LIES) organized by the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, the School of English at Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań (Poland), respond to the current interest in wider mapping of English literature. Each year the symposium is devoted to a particular topic linked with the interests of an invited writer, whose presentation we also publish. This volume is devoted to the issue of self-fashioning and self-representation as it is the main area of interest of Andrew Miller.

Self-fashioning and Self-representation in Literature in English

Counterfeited Our Names We Haue, Craftily All Thynges Vpright to Saue

This book investigates and interprets various social ideologies in the moralities and interludes, dramatic texts of the late medieval period. Most of the selected plays have not been previously analyzed from the perspective of the linguistic and ideological content. Seen within the larger cultural context, mainly compared with other non-dramatic texts of the period, these texts represent rich sources of those social ideologies whose aim was to create principled individuals and a morally sound, well-functioning society.

Social Ideologies in English Moralities and Interludes, 1350-1517

In a Manner of Morall Playe

Katarzyna Bronk

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Medieval English Studies Symposium held in Poznań (Poland), in November 2009. The papers cover a wide range of approaches to the issue of the afterlife, heaven and hell in Old and Middle English as well as post-medieval literature.

Liliana Sikorska

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