Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands

This interdisciplinary collection explores the diverse relationships between the frequently ignored and inherently ambiguous hinterlands and their manifestations in literature and culture. Moving away from perspectives that emphasize the marginality of hinterlands and present them as devoid of agency and “cultural currency”, this collection assembles a series of original essays using various modes of engagement to reconceptualize hinterlands and highlight their semiotic complexity. Apart from providing a reassessment of hinterlands in terms of their geocultural significance, this book also explores hinterlands through such concepts as nostalgia, heterotopia, identity formation, habitation, and cognitive mapping, with reference to a wide geographical field. Literary and filmic revisions of familiar hinterlands, such as the Australian outback, Alberta prairie, and Arizona desert, are juxtaposed in this volume with representations of such little-known European hinterlands as Lower Silesia and Ukraine, and the complicated political dimension of First World War internment camps is investigated with regard to Kapuskasing (Ontario). Rural China and the Sussex Downs are examined here as writers’ retreats. Inner-city hinterlands in Haiti, India, Morocco, and urban New Jersey take on new meaning when contrasted with the vast hinterlands of megacities like Johannesburg and Los Angeles. The spectrum of diverse approaches to hinterlands helps to reinforce their multilayered and multivocal nature as spaces that defy clear categorization.

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak is Full Professor of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she teaches English literature and cultural and adaptation studies. Much of her research has focused on visuality and the nexus of space and literature. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Controversy Over Baroque (Wrocław UP); Visual Seen and Unseen: Insights into Tom Stoppard’s Art (Wrocław U P); and From Concept-City to City Experience (Atut 2013). She co-edited several collections of essays including the latest (with Eva C. Karpinski), Adaptation and Beyond: Hybrid Transtextualities (Routledge 2023), she guest co-edited for the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, and has been editor-in-chief of Anglica Wratislaviensia (Poland) since 2013.

Dominika Ferens is an associate professor of American literature at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Much of her research has focused on affect, race, gender, and sexuality in American literature. In Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002), she examined the paradoxes of Orientalism in the writings of two sisters of Chinese-English-Canadian descent. Her book Ways of Knowing Small Places: Intersections of American Literature and Ethnography since the 1960s (2011) looked at literature’s quarrels and affinities with ethnography. Since 2006, she has co-edited the open-access InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies.

Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she teaches American literature. She is the author of California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden (2019; paperback edition 2020) and Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal (2007). She co-edited three volumes, Representations and Images of Frontiers and Borders: On the Edge (2022), A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture (2017), and Interiors: Interiority/Exteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (2010). Her scholarly interests include critical posthumanism and global literatures in English.

Marcin Tereszewski is an assistant professor at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where he specializes in modern British fiction and literary theory. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). His current research interests include an examination of psychogeographical and architectural aspects of dystopian fiction, particularly in relation to J. G. Ballard’s fiction.