On the Borders of Convention

The research presented in this book is authored by scholars coming from as distant regions as South Africa, the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Italy, Belarus, the Balkans. Needless to say that one of the good things about this international cooperation is that owing to their different socio-cultural backgrounds, these scholars have contributed to producing an extremely varied picture of ways of approaching the challenge of a changing world. The papers on literature and culture collected in this book contribute a further element of rigour into the discussion of numerous and always varying and changing borders of convention in a literary text, literary genre, and literary theory, as well as in general culture and everyday paths of life. Starting with oral cultures, over the classic literary masters, modernist and postmodernist textual and theoretical phenomena, the twentieth century flouting of numerous social and gender convention, through painting, film, dance, contemporary music, as well as graffiti, We have sought to stress that what is most noticeable from the evidence of their studies is that scholars today concern these issues through a dynamic global process and beyond any preconceived design, or any strict set of theoretical prescriptions, which would otherwise lead them to ignore the ever-shifting borders in literature and culture, as well as in global socio-cultural reality in general. The variety and complexity of these essays offer fresh views to the problem posed in the title of the book. Therefore, we trust that they will stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field of literature and cultural studies.
About the Author: Aleksandra NIKCEVIC BATRICEVIC is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Montenegro. She also teaches courses on feminist literary theory and English language at the Department of History. Although in her publications she primarily focuses on the works of Herman Melville and English and American female poets, her interests also include literary theory (narratology and feminist criticism/theory). During the previous years she has participated at various international conferences and herself co-organized five on Anglo-American studies at the University of Montenegro. She has also organized two conferences on female writing that took place in American Corner in Podgorica. Together with Marija Kneevic, she co-edited Culture-Bound Translation and Language in the Global Era History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World, and Recounting Cultural Encounters. She is president of the Society for Anglo-American Literary Studies and member of the editorial boards of several literary magazines (ARS, Lingua Montenegrina, Folia Linguistica et Literaria) in Montenegro. Her translations include literary texts as well as texts related to literary theory. Marija KNEAEVIC teaches 19th- and 20th-century British Literature, Canadian Literature, as well as British and American Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Montenegro, where she also works as a vice dean for international relations. Her publications focus on the work of D. H. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence in Italy, Beograd, 2000, Quest for the Transcendent in D. H. Lawrence's Prose, Niksic, 2009, but her recent interests also include travel writing and Native American literature. Together with Aleksandra Nikcevic Batricevic, she co-edited Culture-Bound Translation and Language in the Global Era History, Politics, Identity: Reading Literature in a Changing World, and Recounting Cultural Encounters all published by Cambridge Scholars Publishers. She edited and co-edited a series of translations of British, Canadian, and Native American authors. She is the current general editor of linguistics and literature journal Folia Linguistica et Literaria, and a member of the editorial boards of Rijec, University of Montenegro, Philologia, University of Belgrade, Serbia, [SIC!], University of Zadar, Croatia.