Ex-changes: Comparative Studies in British and American Cultures is a collection of articles exploring a variety of cultural texts – such as fiction, film, drama, poetry, and critical thought – in order to present the on-going transfer of ideas and processes of complementation that characterise cultural (re)production. The analyses gathered in the volume document the shifting ways of thinking about individual identity and social formations, describe the mobility of definitions of gender and nationality, and address the changing relations between various genres and disciplines through adaptation and re-writing. All of these preoccupations can be located within the broad domain of Comparative Studies, drawing comparisons across time, space, societies, cultures, genres, media and disciplines.
The scope of the themes covered by the essays comprising this volume not only confirms the significance of comparative studies in contemporary cultural research, but also testifies to the validity of comparative methods, both in individual critical analysis and the writing process. Beneath the well-defined divisions of comparative studies in their inter-disciplinary preoccupations, such as comparisons involved in translation, adaptation, cross-cultural studies or relationships between various arts, this volume exposes to what extent individual cultural texts are founded on comparative structures and concepts, conceptualised through analogies, changes and internal splits.
