The Lives of Texts

Exploring the Metaphor

Edited By: Andrzej Kowalczyk, Katarzyna Pisarska

£49.99

Exploring the metaphor of a text as a living organism, this book traces life-like phenomena—birth, maturation, death, and resurrection—in literature from the Middle Ages to popular culture, including works by Mary Shelley, J.K. Rowling, and Neil Gaiman.

The Lives of Texts: Exploring the Metaphor examines various instances of “textual subsistence” implied by the title. Drawing on the parallel between a text and…

The Lives of Texts: Exploring the Metaphor examines various instances of “textual subsistence” implied by the title. Drawing on the parallel between a text and a living organism, the contributors analyze various literary texts ranging from the Middle Ages to postmodernity, as well as film adaptations and the graphic novel. Apart from the works of canonical writers, attention is also drawn to some long-forgotten authors, along with the most recent instances of popular literature and culture. The exploration of the title metaphor allows the contributors to trace life-like phenomena (e.g. textual birth, maturation, dissemination, death and resurrection) in the texts of writers so remote from each other as Layamon, Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Charles Williams, Ursula Le Guin, A. S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Banks, J. K. Rowling, or Neil Gaiman.

Katarzyna Pisarska is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria-Curie Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. She is the author of Mediating the World in Iain Banks’s Novels (forthcoming), as well as articles and book chapters on contemporary British and American fiction and dystopian cinema.

Andrzej Sławomir Kowalczyk is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria-Curie Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He is the author of The Voice of God, the Voice of Man: Religious Discourse in Late Medieval English Drama (2007). He has also published articles and book chapters on Charles Williams’s drama and fiction, as well as on dystopia in contemporary literature and film.