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This volume, entitled Of what is past, or passing, or to come: Travelling in Time and Space in Literature in English was inspired by the work of the writer, culture historian and mythographer Marina Warner and the professor of comparative literature Cathy Caruth. The lines quoted above are from W.B. Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium, which are recalled by one of the characters in Marina Warner’s novel In a Dark Wood (1977). The articles included in this volume are devoted to the explorations of individual space and landscape of the mind through analyzing trauma and addressing psychological wounds, and to travels into fairy tales, oriental scenery real and imaginary as well as interrelationships between memory and fiction in non-fictional and fictional discourses.

Eyes deep with unfathomable histories is a quotation taken from the poem by Pauline Melville entitled «Homeland». This volume was inspired by two areas: the first one was the writings of Pauline Melville, a British novelist, a poet and actress with Wapisiana (South American Indian) ancestry, and the second by Canadian magic realism. The majority of the articles in the collection focus on a variety of aspects of magic realism in contemporary Canadian literature in English, which abounds in texts representative of the mode; but some also approach magic realist texts by British novelists and US playwrights. The authors of the articles come from Europe and North America, and include established scholars, such as Jeanne Delbaere-Garant, who has been writing about developments within magic realism in Canada and beyond for almost thirty years, and Hartmut Lutz, an authority on Canadian Native literatures; as well as promising young scholars. They approach classics of magic realism, such as novels by Jack Hodgins, Robert Kroetsch and Angela Carter, but also more recent texts by Joan Clark, Bernard Assiniwi, Rachel A. Quitsualik, Thomas King, Rawi Hage, Margaret Sweatman, Lilian Nattel, Susanne Swann and Eden Robinson among others.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Medieval English Studies Symposium held in Poznan (Poland), in November 2009. The papers cover a wide range of approaches to the issue of the afterlife, heaven and hell in Old and Middle English as well as post-medieval literature.

Literature in English is a term that has recently appeared to include both English literature in the traditional sense of the word and all the newly emerging literatures written and published in English whose authors may represent various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This series as well as our yearly Literature in English Symposium (LIES) organized by the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, the School of English at Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan (Poland), respond to the current interest in wider mapping of English literature. Each year the symposium is devoted to a particular topic linked with the interests of an invited writer, whose presentation we also publish. This volume is devoted to the issue of self-fashioning and self-representation as it is the main area of interest of Andrew Miller.