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."

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Medieval English Studies Symposium held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2011. The papers cover a wide range of approaches to the issue of medieval literature, language and art.

This volume, entitled Of what is past, or passing, or to come: Travelling in Time and Space in Literature in English was inspired by the work of the writer, culture historian and mythographer Marina Warner and the professor of comparative literature Cathy Caruth. The lines quoted above are from W.B. Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, which are recalled by one of the characters in Marina Warner's novel In a Dark Wood (1977). The articles included in this volume are devoted to the explorations of individual space and landscape of the mind through analyzing trauma and addressing psychological wounds, and to travels into fairy tales, oriental scenery real and imaginary as well as interrelationships between memory and fiction in non-fictional and fictional discourses.

Empty treasure chests dumped from departed ships is a quotation taken from David Dabydeen's poem The Old Map in which the hope of a new world is green but green symbolizes also the gangrene of the sailors. Such rather unsavory paradoxes can be found in the works of contemporary (post)postcolonial writers, who engage in a dialogue with literary history while actively re-shaping contemporary culture. Far from seeking easy reconciliations, the contemporary (post)postcolonial writers rewrite the colonial experiences in relation to art and literary works. The theme of this volume are the works by and about David Dabydeen, a Guianese British writer, poet and literary scholar, whose efforts have always been directed toward re-creating the lives forever lost; those of nameless slaves and coolies of the West Indies. His inspiration, in turn were, among others, the paintings of William Hogarth and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Accordingly, the papers collected in this book address the question of (post)colonialism in a contemporary (post)postcolonial reality.

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.

This book contains a selection of papers presented at the Second Medieval English Studies Symposium held in Poznań, Poland in November 2003. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the areas of Old and Middle English language and literature: from language contact and Middle English syntax to pragmatics, and from Chaucer to Middle English religious and secular discourse.