This book analyses the ways of conceptualising and interpreting the interaction between physical and metaphysical worlds in Polish folklore. A linguistic and anthropological analysis offered in this study focuses primarily on myth, ritual and symbol as reflected in language (dialect lexis, phraseology, speech acts). Employing the methodology and analytical tools of cognitive linguistics (preconceptual image schemas, cognitive scene, profiling of concepts, development of cognitive paths), the author reconstructs mental patterns at the heart of mythical thinking, linguistic actions and symbolic...

This book explores the amorphous, fragmented and digressive world of George Gordon Byron's poetic works, which are pervaded by the themes of change, mutability, deformation and transgression, often presented or described as madness. The blurring of the border between fiction and reality is a matter of the author's decisions concerning both his life and his texts, and a conscious process of construction and self-fashioning. It is also a recurring epistemological theme in Byron's works, which make take the form of narrative dis-orientation and the dismantling of easy cultural pre-conceptions....