This volume discusses the question of presence and/or absence from a transdisciplinary perspective, and intends to provide insights into how a wide range of disciplines addresses this issue which has been at the centre of philosophical, theoretical and critical debates in the past decades. As the essays in the volume prove, apparently diverse areas can have a lot in common and talk to each other in sometimes surprising ways. The topics discussed include modals in various languages and black slave funeral sermons, pragmatic markers and the Australian Stolen Generation, the transcendental in poems by Ann Bradstreet, Arthur Symons and Philip Larkin, short stories by Katherine Mansfield, generic presences in Virginia Woolf and contemporary journalism, haunting presences in fin-de-siecle ghost stories and in a contemporary horror film, mythical structures in John Cowper Powys and Margaret Atwood, and gender politics in Pat Barker and Sarah Waters. The analyses, as they talk to each other, create multiple dialogues without imposing closures and ultimate interpretations on the plethora of possible meanings emerging from the juxtaposition of these essays. This transdisciplinary volume, written in an erudite but reader-friendly language, will be of great interest to both the academic world, as well as a broader readership interested in how linguistic phenomena in general, cultural myths of all kinds, various cinematic, literary and journalistic genres from diverse periods can be approached and opened up to new readings and meanings from the perspective of presences and absences.
About the Author: Nora Sellei (1961) is Reader both at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, and at the Catholic University, Ruzomberok, Slovakia. Apart from almost one hundred articles, her publications include Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Personal and Professional Bond (Peter Lang, 1996), and four monographs in Hungarian, focusing on 19th-century English women writers; on 20th-century women's autobiographies; on Hungarian feminist theory and criticism; and on cultural (self-)reflexivity in Virginia Woolf's writings of the thirties. She translated Jean Rhys's Smile Please, and Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being and Three Guineas. She edited and translated a reader on feminism and (post)modernism, and was the series editor of the Hungarian feminist series Artemis Books. Katarina Labudova (1976) teaches British and Canadian Literature at the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia. She received her PhD in 2011 in the field of Comparative Literatures at the University of Masaryk, Brno, Czech Republic. Her dissertation deals with Angela Carter's and Margaret Atwood's strategies of writing beyond genre conventions. Katarina Labudova has published several articles focused on Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, identity, monstrosity and the representations of the body in postmodern literatures. Her research interests also include Slovak and Roma fairytales and the role of female tricksters in them.