Ex-changes: Comparative Studies in British and American Cultures

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska · Katarzyna Więckowska

Feb 2013 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

Ex-changes: Comparative Studies in British and American Cultures is a collection of articles exploring a variety of cultural texts – such as fiction, film, drama, poetry, and critical thought – in order to present the on-going transfer of ideas and processes of complementation that characterise cultural (re)production. The analyses gathered in the volume document the shifting ways of thinking about individual identity and social formations, describe the mobility of definitions of gender and nationality, and address the changing relations between various genres and disciplines through adaptation and re-writing. All of these preoccupations can be located within the broad domain of Comparative Studies, drawing comparisons across time, space, societies, cultures, genres, media and disciplines.

The scope of the themes covered by the essays comprising this volume not only confirms the significance of comparative studies in contemporary cultural research, but also testifies to the validity of comparative methods, both in individual critical analysis and the writing process. Beneath the well-defined divisions of comparative studies in their inter-disciplinary preoccupations, such as comparisons involved in translation, adaptation, cross-cultural studies or relationships between various arts, this volume exposes to what extent individual cultural texts are founded on comparative structures and concepts, conceptualised through analogies, changes and internal splits.

About the author

Katarzyna Więckowska, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where she teaches literary and cultural theory, media and film studies, and gender in contemporary British fiction. She has published On Alterity: A Study of Monstrosity and Otherness (2008), edited The Gothic (2011), and co-edited Litteraria Copernicana: Cyborg (2011).

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where she teaches British cultural studies, gender and British drama. She has published on experiment and site in theatre, as well as gender and intertextuality in British drama. Her publications include The Hybrid in the Limen (2003), Corporeal Inscriptions (co-edited, 2005), and Litteraria Copernicana: Cyborg (co-edited, 2011).