Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, No. 7 (2017)

Andrzej Wicher, Rachel E. Burke

Issue 7 (2017) of Text Matters opens with an exclusive conversation between Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist, critic, and video artist, and Dorota Filipczak, the journal's editor-in-chief. It is followed by a special section entitled "Emma and Edvard" (edited by Rachel E. Burke) that includes seven scholarly texts revolving thematically around Emma and Edvard: Love in the Time of Loneliness, an exhibition curated by Mieke Bal that opened in Munchmuseet, Oslo, on 27 January 2017. The articles explore the intersections between the works of Gustave Flaubert, Edvard Munch, Henrik Ibsen, and Charlotte Salomon, among others. The volume continues with an extensive section named "Drama, Performance, Media" (edited by Andrzej Wicher). Its main points of focus are reflected by the titles of its three subsections: "Shakespeare in New Configurations," "The Importance of Performative Aspects of Drama," and "Experimental Mimesis in Modern British and Irish Drama." The first of them presents selected aspects of Shakespearean studies: the distribution of gender roles in The Tempest, the (mis)representation of fairies in Shakespeare's oeuvre, the political implications of a Shakespearean theatre festival organized in a post-war Poland, as well as affinities between the Bard of Avon and Stanisław Wyspiański. The second one discusses Dickensian musicals on stage and screen, the importance of translation in contemporary opera productions, recreational drama classes for the elderly in the UK, and the concept of contagion in the theatrical context. The third one deals with Edward Bond's theories of drama, Caryl Churchill's plays, the employment of diegetic and narrative forms in modern Anglophone drama, and, finally, the works of Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter. The volume concludes with a short section, "Traditional Epic Patterns Seen in the Perspective of Modernity," which contains two texts (on the portrayal of Eowyn in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and on Lloyd Jones's novel, Mister Pip).