Contributions reprinted in this book highlight some of the wide ranging ways in which the issues of culture and identity can be approached in a literary text, while focusing on the ways in which cultural encounters have been changing both the world and its reflection in literature. The beginning of the twenty first century is an appropriate time to repay careful attention to these issues. Understanding how our perception of the Other changes with the concept of the world we inhabit, we want to emphasize the rising importance of fostering cultural pluralism and global understanding. For its argumentation strongly founded in recent literary studies and humanities in general, its interdisciplinary nature and its focus on the actual global problems of abrupt cultural change and exchange, its heightened understanding of the necessity of coexistence of differences in a changing world, its spirit of tolerance, and its international spirit in general, we assume this collection will not only attract academic literary scholars but will also appeal to the general reading public.
About the Author: Marija KNEAEVIC teaches 19th- and 20th-century British literature, at the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Montenegro, which she also currently chairs. Her publication primarily focuses on the work of D. H. Lawrence, but her recent interests are also contemporary British and Canadian literature, as well as travel writing. She is the author of Lorens u Italiji (Belgrade, 2001), co-author of Reader's Companion to Victorian Literature (Podgorica, 2004, in cooperation with Aleksandra Nikcevic-Batricevic). She has cooperated in compilation of Serbian-English and English-Serbian Dictionary (Belgrade, 2003). She has widely translated in literature, participated at numerous international conferences and herself co-organized three on English Language and Literary Studies, which yielded rich material for four volumes of proceedings, two of which are accepted to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Aleksandra NIKCEVIC-BATRICEVIC teaches English and American literature at the Department of English language and literature, University of Montenegro. She also teaches English language at the Departments of Italian and German language, and at the Faculty for Visual Arts. Both her M.A. and her doctoral dissertation are on American literature. Although in her publications she primarly focuses on the works of Herman Melville and American female poets, her interests also include narratology, feminist criticism, and various other authors from the domain of English and American literature. During the previous years she has participated at various international conferences and herself co-organized three on Anglo-American studies at the University of Montenegro. She is president of the Society for Anglo-American Literary Studies and general editor of literary magazine Lit, published at the University of Montenegro