Studies of Anglophone Literatures in Central Europe

This book paints the landscape of major trends and achievements of studies in Anglophone literatures in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Slovenia and Ukraine. The book shows which tendencies in these investigations are common to all these former Communist countries and which are specific to any of them, which ones and to what extent are shared with global research in the field. The material presented covers the periods before WW II, from 1939-45 to the "autumn of nations" in 1989, and after that caesura, with concentration on the most recent years. The sequence of the essays is from comprehensive surveys of the entire field of investigations through evaluative presentation of some of the main and most influential publications to evaluation of academic system and methods of teaching literatures in English. The surveys are focussed on both the major tendencies and the particular phenomena illustrating them, and combine manifestations of studies in literatures in English with contexts external to them (including political ones). They display a variety and wealth of the issues studied, of the critical approaches, schools and areas of research against the changing canon of English literature in the XX century, especially of contemporary literature.

Wiesław Krajka is a professor in the English Department at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin and Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland. He was a Visiting Professor at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Rochester, New York. His research covers mainly English XIX and XX century literature (especially Joseph Conrad), literary theory, and comparative literature.