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Dreams, Nightmares and Empty Signifiers is the first study of contemporary literary representations of one of the most iconic topoi in English literature and culture - the country house. The book analyses nine contemporary novels, including Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger and Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, by situating them in a broader context of manorial literary tradition. Analysing the different traditions of the novel of manners, gothic fiction and postmodern metafiction, the book identifies three principal variants of the manorial topos, which expound the country house as the locus of varied, often contradictory meanings.
List of contents
Contents: English country house in literature - Country house novel - Contemporary novel - Novel of manners - Gothic fiction - Metafiction - Julian Fellowes Snobs - Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child - Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day - Sarah Waters Fingersmith - Sarah Waters The Little Stranger - Ian McEwan Atonement - Toby Litt Finding Myself.
About the author
Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin. She is the author of a book study on Virginia Woolf's novels (2006). Her main research interests are modernist and postmodernist fiction, semiotics of space and urban theory and representation.
Report
Configured against a rich background of the existing theoretical and critical reflection, the book Dreams, Nightmares and Empty Signifiers by Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga successfully attempts to integrate the often ambivalent ideologies and contradictory political stances ascribed to the country house in various critical readings by approaching it as an element of the semiosphere with dynamic shifts of discourses, values and meanings. Presenting the country-house topos as part of broadly conceived literary tradition, Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga boldly redefines the theoretical paradigms so far dominant in the critical discourse.
(Jadwiga Wegrodzka, University of Gdansk)
