Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Dreams, Nightmares and Empty Signifiers: The English Country House in the Contemporary Novel: 7 (Mediated Fictions: Studies in Verbal and Visual Narratives)

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. Review 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 Węgrodzka, University of Gdańsk) About the Author Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-Skłodowska 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.