Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak is Full Professor of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she teaches English literature and cultural and adaptation studies. Much of her research has focused on visuality and the nexus of space and literature. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Controversy Over Baroque (Wrocław UP); Visual Seen and Unseen: Insights into Tom Stoppard’s Art (Wrocław U P); and From Concept-City to City Experience (Atut 2013). She co-edited several collections of essays including the latest (with Eva C. Karpinski), Adaptation and Beyond: Hybrid Transtextualities (Routledge 2023), she guest co-edited for the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, and has been editor-in-chief of Anglica Wratislaviensia (Poland) since 2013. Dominika Ferens is an associate professor of American literature at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Much of her research has focused on affect, race, gender, and sexuality in American literature. In Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002), she examined the paradoxes of Orientalism in the writings of two sisters of Chinese-English-Canadian descent. Her book Ways of Knowing Small Places: Intersections of American Literature and Ethnography since the 1960s (2011) looked at literature’s quarrels and affinities with ethnography. Since 2006, she has co-edited the open-access InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies. Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice is an associate professor of American literature and culture at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where she teaches American literature. She is the author of California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden (2019; paperback edition 2020) and Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal (2007). She co-edited three volumes, Representations and Images of Frontiers and Borders: On the Edge (2022), A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture (2017), and Interiors: Interiority/Exteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (2010). Her scholarly interests include critical posthumanism and global literatures in English. Marcin Tereszewski is an assistant professor at the University of Wrocław, Poland, where he specializes in modern British fiction and literary theory. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). His current research interests include an examination of psychogeographical and architectural aspects of dystopian fiction, particularly in relation to J. G. Ballard’s fiction.

List of Contributors

Editors’ Introduction – Hinterlands: A Return of the Outside

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak, Marcin Tereszewski, Dominika Fe

rens, and Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice

Part I: Hinterlands as Movement

Chapter 1

The Transnational Hinterlands of Los Angeles in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange

Dominika Ferens

Chapter 2

Mapping Identity and Memory in Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Sophie Kriegel

Chapter 3

Decrepitude, Dispossession, Poetry, and a No-place as a Site of Weak Resistance: 21st-century America as a Hinterland in the films Paterson and Nomadland

Zofia Kolbuszewska

Part II: Heterotopic Hinterlands

Chapter 4

Spaces of Identity in Morocco: Maureen F. McHugh’s Nekropolis

Marta Komsta

Chapter 5

Unravelling the Haitian Hinterland as a Twofold Space: Dany Laferrière and Yanick Lahens

Izabela Poręba

Chapter 6

Haven, Rebellion, Revelation: Australian Hinterlands as Heterotopias in Peter Carey’s Novels

Barbara Klonowska

Chapter 7

The Ethical Call from the Hinterlands: Conceptualizing Waste in J. G Ballard’s High-Rise and Concrete Island

Marcin Tereszewski

Chapter 8

Post-anthropocentric Hinterlands: Susan Straight’s California

Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice

Part III: Regenerative and Nostalgic Hinterlands

Chapter 9

(Re)constructing Identity along the Road through the Chinese Hinterland: Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain and Ma Jian’s Red Dust

Raffael Weger

Chapter 10

Chenkalchoola: Reconfiguring the Social Imaginary of an Indian Hinterland

S. M. Mithuna and Maya Vinai

Chapter 11

Neither Peace nor Haven: Sussex as Virginia Woolf’s Imagined Hinterland

Paulina Pająk

Part IV: Hinterlands Revisited and Reimagined

Chapter 12

Lower Silesian Hinterlands: Revisiting and Re-inhabiting the “Recovered Territories”

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak

Chapter 13

“There Was Nothing”: Return Journeys and the Creation of (Multi)directional Postmemories in 21st-Century Anglophone Novels

Mona Becker

Chapter 14

Ukrainians in Canadian Hinterlands: Children's and Young Adult Historical Fiction on the World War I Internment

Mateusz Świetlicki

Chapter 15

Internal Hinterland: Post-Racial Geography of Los Angeles in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout

Sascha Pöhlmann

Index