In recent decades the masquerade has enjoyed a revival in literary and cultural studies. It has been seen as a symptom of the irrational trends permeating the Age of Reason and as a sign of the instability, arbitrariness as well as non-essentiality of personal identity; notions testifying to affinities between the eighteenth century and our own time. In Quest of the Self offers a new consideration not only of the masquerade as such, but also of the ways in which it was transposed into literature during the period. Here it emerges as a dominant trope governing the poetics and the ideological...

Ever since John Arbuthnot published The History of John Bull in 1712, the figure of John Bull has stereotypically personified the best and the worst traits of the British (or English) national character. The present work takes the eponymous juxtaposition as an incentive to study the variety of multi-faceted contacts between the two sides. Given the recent attempts at a re-definition of the relationship between Britain and the Continent best visible in the turmoil over Britain s EU membership the results of the research will hopefully stimulate discussion about John Bull s ever-changing...

This collection of original research essays celebrates in a scholarly focused fashion the 250th anniversary of Ann Radcliffe's birthday. "The Great Enchantress" of the Gothic romance, as her contemporaries re-christened her, was then and has been ever since the publication of her fiction, an author endowed with exceptional powers of enchantment over words, sounds and images. The contributors to this collection, all expert academics from Poland, France and Lithuania, specializing in 18th- and 19th-century literature, are determined to show that the enduring cultural presence of the...