Literature

This collection of essays navigates literal and metaphorical “passages”—crossings, boundaries, and identity. Combining close textual readings with cultural theory, it stimulates debate on how old texts are revisited and how identity is renegotiated.

Though traditionally seen as opposites, the writers Scott and Byron cherished a lifelong friendship. This study reveals how Scott’s invention of the historical novel was crucial to Byron’s later work, shaping the evolution of the Byronic Hero and Byron himself.

Juliusz Słowacki is one of Poland’s most important writers, but little known in the West. This much-needed introduction contains his popular play Balladina, his meditative poem Agamemnon’s Tomb, and his hilarious mock-epic Beniowski.

These essays address how love and death are linked in women’s lives. While male writers associate women’s sexuality with death, women writers from Marguerite de Navarre to Amélie Nothomb rework the old formulae, offering love that defies death’s frontiers.

This book reads postmodern fiction through the bodies of its narrators. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminist theory, it explores trauma, murder, and desire, exposing the body as the site of repressed knowledge, resistance, and artistic resolution.