Faces of Crisis in 20th-and 21st-Century Prose. An Anthology of Criticism offers a unique overview of the motif of crisis tackled by 20th-and 21st-century novelists. In one way or another, crisis has always been an inevitable part of our lives and it is still a central aspect of the contemporary world, in which we are constantly inundated with information about economic, environmental, and health threats.
The anthology is divided into three parts pertaining to the main themes of the articles. The first section "Selves in Crisis" is concerned with personal and identity crisis. The second part "Bonds in Crisis" is devoted to interpersonal relationships and family ties. The third section "Worlds in Crisis" deals with threats on a global scale, both in the present and in the future. Focused on the main theme, literary scholars from different European universities tackle the problem of crisis from various perspectives, analysing works by authors such as James Joyce, Vita Sackville-West, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Daphne du Maurier, D.H. Lawrence, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Zoë Wicomb, Rachel Seiffert, Sarah Waters, Diane Setterfield, Boualem Sansal, Philip K. Dick, and Suketu Mehta.
The anthology opens with the article "Literature as Crisis" written by Dr Richard Brown from the University of Leeds, UK. Other articles are authored by young scholars representing universities both in Poland and abroad.
This book offers innovative readings of the motif of crisis as explored by twentieth- and twenty-first-century novelists, spanning personal and identity crisis, interpersonal relationships and family ties, and threats on a global scale.
The main value of this anthology lies in its unique array of perspectives. The contributors focus on literary works which may have been analysed by other scholars, but never before have they been examined from the perspective of crisis and its different forms. Many of the discussed works were written, or rediscovered, in the last two decades. To the best of my knowledge, there is no other study like this volume.
