Monty Python s Flying Circus was one of the most important and influential cultural phenomena of the 1960s and 1970s. The British program was followed by albums, stage appearances, and several films, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Life of Brian, and Monty Python s The Meaning of Life. In all, the comic troupe drew on a variety of cultural references that prominently figured in their sketches, and also tackled weighty matters that nonetheless amused their audiences. In Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition: Cultural Contexts in Monty Python, Tomasz Dobrogoszcz presents essays that explore the various touchstones in the television episodes and subsequent films. These essays look at a variety of themes prompted by the comic geniuses: .Death .The depiction of women .Shakespearean influences .British and American cultural representations .Reactions from foreign viewers The volume offers a distinguished academic discussion of Monty Python s oeuvre, exhibiting highly varied approaches from a number of theoretical perspectives, including gender studies, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. Featuring a foreword by Python alum Terry Jones, Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition will appeal to anyone interested in cultural history and media studies, as well as the general fans of Monty Python who want to know more about the impact of this groundbreaking group."

The book provides a lucid analysis of all Ian McEwan fiction published to date, from his 1975 debut short stories up to the 2016 novel Nutshell, spanning forty years of his literary career. Apart from a general discussion of McEwan's works, the study offers a uniform focal point: it concentrates on one of the key issues taken up by the writer - the aspect of relationships between partners and between family members. As the book demonstrates, the novelist employs interpersonal relations to establish a pertinent context in which he can dramatically portray the process of identity formation in his characters. Throughout his fiction, McEwan consistently uses references to psychoanalysis, either veiled or direct. The proposed book investigates the novelist's oeuvre through the lens of the psychoanalytic theory developed by Jacques Lacan. The approach used makes the book useful both for readers well familiar with this apparatus, and for those who need introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis and such of his concepts as "desire," "fantasy," "the symbolic order" or " the Name-of-the-Father."

This collection of essays on Graham Swift's fiction brings together the perspectives of renowned Swift scholars from around the world. Authors look at the swift's oeuvre from different interpretative angles, combining a variety of critical and theoretical approaches. This book covers all of Swift's fiction, including his novels and short stories; special emphasis, however, is on his most recent books. By approaching Swift's work from a number of perspectives, the volume offers a synthetic overview of his literary output. In particular, it searches for thematic and formal continuities between his early and more recent fiction, and attempts to emphasize its new developments and interests.