On the Borders of Convention (PDF)

The research presented in this book is authored by scholars coming from as distant regions as South Africa, the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Italy, Belarus, the Balkans. Needless to say that one of the good things about this international cooperation is that owing to their different socio-cultural backgrounds, these scholars have contributed to producing an extremely varied picture of ways of approaching the challenge of a changing world. The papers on literature and culture collected in this book contribute a further element of rigour into the discussion of numerous and always varying and changing borders of convention in a literary text, literary genre, and literary theory, as well as in general culture and everyday paths of life. Starting with oral cultures, over the classic literary masters, modernist and postmodernist textual and theoretical phenomena, the twentieth century flouting of numerous social and gender convention, through painting, film, dance, contemporary music, as well as graffiti, We have sought to stress that what is most noticeable from the evidence of their studies is that scholars today concern these issues through a dynamic global process and beyond any preconceived design, or any strict set of theoretical prescriptions, which would otherwise lead them to ignore the ever-shifting borders in literature and culture, as well as in global socio-cultural reality in general. The variety and complexity of these essays offer fresh views to the problem posed in the title of the book. Therefore, we trust that they will stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field of literature and cultural studies.