Poisoned Cornucopia

This volume explores the notions of excess, intemperance and overabundance in cultures and literatures of both the English- and Chinese-speaking worlds. It concentrates on some aspects of literary and cultural meanings of excess(es) in various theories and practices of these antipodean territories of human experience and consciousnesses, bringing together what is common between them and what sets the West apart from the East: eroticism, drug abuse, alcoholism, urban concepts, music, food, etc. In times of a serious crisis of Western-style capitalism, growing consumerism and the collapse of traditional values, the eyes of the world are now turned to the East, seeking solutions in China, Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong for what may come as Eastern-style neopostmodernism.

Autorentext

Ryszard W. Wolny is Professor and Director of the School of English and American Studies at the University of Opole (Poland). He is the author of about ninety scholarly publications and a co-editor of Peter Lang series Silesian Studies in Anglophone Cultures and Literatures.
Stankomir Nicieja works at the Department of Culture at the School of English and American Studies in Opole. He published a monograph and more than twenty academic papers on topics ranging from contemporary British fiction, utopia and dystopia in Anglo-American literature to representations of China and Chinese culture in the West.

Inhalt

Contents: Andrew Taylor: «If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on»: The Ambivalences and Necessity of Excess - Tadeusz Rachwal: The End(s) of Excess - Magdalena Maczynska: Cornucopia Reversed: Overabundance and Poverty as Dehumanizing Factors in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy - Anna Branach-Kallas: Abjection, Masochism and Haunting: Traumatic Excess in Jen Sookfong Lee's The End of East - Marek Blaszak: «[F]or me it is an enviable lot to be unhappy with you»; Or, The Surfeit of Emotions in the Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut in the Context of the Major Philosophical-Religious Controversies at the Turn of the 18 Century - Tomasz Pilch: Dead or Alive; Or, When Excess Is Excess: The Composition of Herman Melville's Mardi, and a Voyage Thither in the Context of the Romantic Debate on the Nature of Literary Creation - Nainu Yang: Romantic Love and Its Images as Temporal Objects in Tswen-show Song's Outside the Window - Zbigniew Glowala: Longing for the Forbidden: On an Excess of Restraints in the Works of David Lodge - Tomasz Gadzina: Space in Australian Literature - Katarzyna Rybinska: «A Liquor as Burning as Life» in Guillaume Apollinaire's Literary Output - Ryszard W. Wolny: Eroticism: Its Excesses and Deadly Masks in Contemporary Consumer Societies - Ilona Dobosiewicz: From Godfrey's Cordial to Opium Dens and Pipe Dreams: Opiate Use in Victorian England - Krzysztof Kosecki: Mass Culture as Excess in José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf - Tadeusz Lewandowski: Joel Osteen, the Prosperity Gospel, and the Wages of Christian Conspicuous Consumption - Stephen Dewsbury: It's Just Not Cricket: The Bullingdon Boys at Play - John Eric Starnes: The Excess of Tolerance: American White Nationalist Fiction and the Backlash against Political Correctness - Marzena Zielonka: Sláinte! Excessive Drinking as a Central Part of Irish Culture - Masaya Hiyazaki: Politics as «Expansion of Life»: The Order without Boundaries and Osugi Sakae's Anarchism - Yu Lin Lee: The Excess of Affect: The Technologies of History in Seediq Bale - Hung-chiung Li: Exchanging the Unexchangeable: The Profanation of Capitalism in Taiwan's Betel-Nut Beauties and Li Ang's «The Ghost at Dingfanpo» - Aleksandra Lubczynska: Scenes of Perverse Nature: Excess and Transgression as Art of Existence - Daniel Broudy: Heavy on Firepower: American Media Complicity in Unrestrained Consumption - Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska: Too Much Trivia in the News? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sensationalist Headlines in Online Newscasting - Stankomir Nicieja: The East-Asian Megacity as a Trope in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Sophia Coppola's Lost in Translation.