Intertextual Transactions in American and Irish Fictions: Edited by Janusz Semrau

This volume is a posthumous revised edition of selected papers by Andrzej Kopcewicz on intertextual transactions in classic works of American and Irish fiction, published originally between 1992 and 2005. The book opens with a theoretical essay and proceeds with individual analyses of the interrelatedness, overlappings, entanglements, and reciprocities of some of the best-known works by Paul Auster and Herman Melville - Henry Adams, Frank R. Stockton and Thomas Pynchon - Donald Barthelme and James Joyce - James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino. The chapters lend themselves to being read in any order, selectively, and in isolation. Given a literal perspective by incongruity, however, the Joycean premise of the book is that a commodius vicus of recirculation (type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward) may bring the reader in any case (back) to the beginning.

The Author: Andrzej Kopcewicz (1934-2007) was the first professor ordinarius of American literature in the history of English studies in Poland. For over thirty years, he was head of the first department of American literature in Poland, at the School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. He has published a number of books.