English Studies from Archives to Prospects

Volume 1 – Literature and Cultural Studies

Edited By: Irena Zovko Dinković, Tihana Klepač, Martina Domines Veliki

£47.99

This volume explores temporality in literary studies and the humanities. Contributions engage with the discipline's past, its present condition, and the possibilities for its survival in an age where the relevance of the humanities is being disputed.

When we think about what it is we do in academic literary studies, we do so taking account of time – the time of the…

When we think about what it is we do in academic literary studies, we do so taking account of time – the time of the institution in which this disciplinary practice takes place, and the history of the discipline itself. Since literary studies engage contemporary issues and how they impact the reader, we must also acknowledge processes and events outside the field.

The contributions to this volume engage with the idea of temporality not only in Anglophone literature studies, but in the humanities as a whole. In the first section, the literary contributions show that the humanities owe a debt to the past – new paradigms question and challenge the validity of older ones without necessarily discarding them. The second section shows how the disciplinary archive can be modified and expanded to engage its present condition, while the last deals with what that condition forebodes. Despite the range of perspectives adopted here, all contributions echo the history of the discipline of literary studies itself, its present condition, and the possibilities for its survival in an age in which the relevance of humanities is being disputed.

Stipe Grgas is the Chair of the American Studies program, in which he is also a Professor, at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. In addition to American Studies, his fields of interest are the contemporary American novel, Irish literature and culture, human spatiality and the new economic criticism. His publications include Nietzsche i Yeats [Nietzsche and Yeats] (1989), Ispisivanje prostora: čitanje suvremenog američkog romana [Writing Space: Reading the Contemporary American Novel] (2000), and Kažnjavanje forme: irsko pjesništvo poslije Yeatsa [Punishing Form: Irish Poetry after Yeats] (2006). He has twice served as President of the Croatian Association for English Studies, and is currently President of the Croatian Association of American Studies and the Regional Association of American Studies (AASSE).

Tihana Klepač is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She has published papers in Croatian literary journals on Australian exploration narratives and early Australian women’s writing, and, together with Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan, co-edited Irish Mirror for Croatian Literature: Theoretical Assumptions, Literary Comparisons, Reception. Her interests include 19th century white settler literature of Australia and women’s life writing.

Martina Domines Veliki is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She has published papers in both Croatian and international journals, including Grasmere Journal, Studien Zur Englischen Romantik, and Central European Journal of Canadian Studies. For her first conference on Romanticism, she was granted the Jonathan Wordsworth Scholarship, and she also received two grants for her doctoral research (from the University of Bergen and the University of Newcastle). In 2013, she became President of the Croatian Association for English Studies (HDAS).