Borders and Beyond: Orient-Occident Crossings in Literature

The core of the volume constitutes a collection of 18 papers pertaining to the realm of literary studies, organized into 5 parts under separate headings and authored by 23 academicians representing 13 Universities and one National Academy of Sciences (plus one “independent researcher”) from 9 countries (Iran, Latvia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, and USA), and carefully edited by 3 scholars from Nicolaus Copernicus University of Toruń, Poland. This core is preceded by a purposely written “Foreword” by a noted specialist in Japanese and general linguistics and language pragmatics, and simultaneously a professional translator/interpreter, who is otherwise not involved in the compilation of the book. This is followed by an “Introduction” by the editors, and a general “Index of names”.

These very statistics determine the value and importance of this collective interdisciplinary monograph, especially if one takes into account that inquiries into “Oriental literatures” prevail. Eight texts concern widely perceived Middle East (Arabic-Persian-Azerbaijani-Turkish-Turkmen) issues, three focus on classical, contemporary, and regional (Ryukyuan Miyakoan oral) Japanese literature respectively, two relate (in two very different ways) to China, one to southern India, and the remaining material offers “looks in the opposite direction” at the subject determined by the title of the entire publication (with names like Edward Morgan Forster, Leonard Woolf, Victor Hugo, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Gustave Flaubert, Maxime du Camp, Salman Rushdie, Yuriy Trifonov, and their works involved). Recommendation of the book – one of the most attractive among recent proposals of this kind – to wider university audience is but obvious.

Dr. Alfred F. Majewicz.

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland