This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Medieval English Studies Symposium held in Poznań, Poland, in November 2011. The papers cover a wide range of approaches to the issue of medieval literature, language and art.

In Plato s Symposium, Socrates says that the true poet must be tragic and comic at the same time, and the whole of human life must be felt as a blend of tragedy and comedy. The present collection of essays investigates the presence of comic and tragic elements in Irish literature. The works by Irish authors, be they classical or contemporary, capture the struggles of the lives of individuals and communities in Ireland. Irish literature in various ways deals with the tragic and complex past of the country, as well as an equally interesting present. The irony of the art is always...

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Medieval English Studies Symposium held in Poznan, Poland in November 2006. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the areas of Old and Middle English language and literature: from language contact and Middle English syntax to pragmatics, and from Chaucer to Middle English religious and secular discourse.

The volume contains three linguistic and four literary papers. The linguistic papers are devoted to Middle English spelling of fricatives, the temporal conjunction before in Medieval English and multiple negation in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The literary papers discuss Medieval East Anglian Drama, the making of language in Malory s Morte Darthur, a comparison of Chaucer s Troilus and Criseyde and Boethius s Consolation of Philosophy, and the analysis of Dame Sirith."

This volume, entitled Of what is past, or passing, or to come: Travelling in Time and Space in Literature in English was inspired by the work of the writer, culture historian and mythographer Marina Warner and the professor of comparative literature Cathy Caruth. The lines quoted above are from W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, which are recalled by one of the characters in Marina Warner s novel In a Dark Wood (1977). The articles included in this volume are devoted to the explorations of individual space and landscape of the mind through analyzing trauma and addressing...

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction. Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early...