Name: The Central and the Peripheral
SKU: 1-4438-4596-5
Availability: InStock

The Central and the Peripheral

Studies in Literature and Culture

Edited By: Jakub Lipski, Joanna Malicka, Paweł Schreiber

£44.99

The division between secure centres and unknown peripheries is obsolete. How can we find our way in a world where peripheries become centres and centres turn into peripheries? This book explores how this problem is dealt with in literature and culture.

Representing reality in terms of secure, familiar centres and dangerous, lesser known peripheries is one of the most elementary human cognitive instincts. However, we live…

Representing reality in terms of secure, familiar centres and dangerous, lesser known peripheries is one of the most elementary human cognitive instincts. However, we live in a world where this established division is becoming more and more problematic. One person’s periphery can be another’s centre, and many simple geographies of the world and of the mind, clearly separating the known from the unknown, have become obsolete. How can one reconcile this complexity with the fact that human thinking cannot escape the centre/periphery dichotomy? How is it possible to find one’s way in a world in which peripheries become centres, and centres turn into peripheries? The chapters of this book try to determine how the problem of centres and peripheries has been dealt with in the domains of literature and culture. The contributors focus on different aspects of the issue – from travel writing, through attempts at mapping the self, to finding central and peripheral territories in narrative itself.

Paweł Schreiber is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. He wrote his PhD on the connections between modern British historical drama and contemporary methodology of history. His main publications concern the plays of Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker and Juliusz Słowacki, as well as the image of the Second World War in Polish and American graphic novels.

Joanna Malicka is a Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Her main research interests include postmodern literature, metafiction and experimental fiction. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on the oeuvre of Christine Brooke-Rose.

Jakub Lipski is a Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland. His research interests include eighteenth-century English literature and culture, particularly the works of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation on the masquerade topos in eighteenth-century fiction.