Locations play an important role in every story, but in British and American contemporary crime fiction, they are often inextricable from the narrative. This work examines the city, the countryside and the wilderness as places ripe with literary significance and symbolism. Using works by authors like Robert Galbraith, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Chris Brookmyre, John Knox, Peter Robinson, Linda Barnes, Dana Stabenow, Nevada Barr, Les Roberts, Philip R. Craig, and others, this work offers a fresh assessment of how place and space are employed in contemporary crime fiction. Highlighted are similarities and differences among the authors’ approaches to setting, and how they relate to the history of crime fiction and to the general literary representation of place. Going beyond mere literary geography, the book engages the sociocultural dimensions of the communities affected by crime. Chapters also analyze the reader’s perception, recognition and appreciation of place and community.

The book presents a history of the Department of English and American studies at Masaryk University (Faculty of Arts) in Brno. The narrative is based on the methodology of “oral history”. The narrator is Don Sparling, long associated with the department and a former Head. The first chapter covers the foundation by Professor František Chudoba in 1920 and the interwar period. The following chapters deal with three periods: 1945 to 1977 (Don Sparling's arrival in the department); 1977–1989; and the subsequent period down to 2000. The last chapter sums up the history of an important part of life at the department, the Gypsywood Players theatre group.

The publication Places and Spaces of Crime in Popular Imagination is part of the Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English Series. The text reflects growing interest in popular literary genres not only among the readers, but mainly in literary research. This still rather under-researched area is now representing fertile grounds for various theoretical approaches. As the publication mainly declares its interest in crime-related genres, its focus on place is justifiable: it reflects the postmodern “spatial turn”, manifested in an increased emphasis on the location of crime, not necessarily in the sense of the crime scene itself, but as a socio-geographical place and space. The setting of crime has a specific and well-defined role in the traditional crime genres, but this role has been redefined in the modern versions of crime-related fiction. ranging from educating the reader in certain areas, bringing up current problems, deepening the psychological aspect of individual characters etc. The published volume brings forth various aspects of this new role of place in popular genres centering on crime and gives space to its deeper analysis. It is not the researchers´ objective to provide overviews of the history of the theoretical discussion of place and space in literature in general. Instead, although the essays do employ a variety of critical approaches, the collection strives to show practically how place and space is employed in the specific material of the selected works.

This is the first book-length study foregrounding Auden’s sense of place as a means for enhancing our grasp of this crucial twentieth-century poet.

Proposing that Auden had a remarkable spatial sensibility, this book concentrates on his treatment of his homeland England, as well as the North Pennines and Iceland, both of which served as his ‘good’ places, ‘holy’ grounds and sources of topophilic sentiment. The readings draw on the scholarship of humanistic geography, tracing patterns of mental constructs which emerge from spatial experience. In a scholarly but engaging way, this book argues that focusing on Auden’s poetics of place as it emerged and evolved can be instrumental to our understanding of this influential poet not only in relation to his epoch but also to the Anglophone poetic tradition. Precisely because of his stature, these elaborations on Auden’s preoccupation with places, escapism, borders and local identity promise to enrich our understanding of the cultural and intellectual climate of the interwar period, when established notions of local places and cultures were beginning to be contested by internationalisation.

This study will be of interest to both academics and students in the field of Anglophone literary studies while also appealing to those attracted to Auden’s poetry, interwar culture and the literary representation of space.

This publication looks at fictional portrayals of William Shakespeare with a focus on novels, short stories, plays, occasional poems, films, television series and even comics. In terms of time span, the analysis covers the entire twentieth century and ends in the present-day. The authors included range from well-known figures (G.B. Shaw, Kipling, Joyce) to more obscure writers. The depictions of Shakespeare are varied to say the least, with even interpretations giving credence to the Oxfordian theory and feminist readings involving a Shakespearian sister of sorts. The main argument is that readings of Shakespeare almost always inform us more about the particular author writing the specific work than about the historical personage.

The book presents the history of drama in the United States from the beginnings in mid-17th century to 1916 and as such, it it the first survey in the Czech language. It puts the most important movements and works into social-historical and theatre contexts. It consists of two parts. The first part is a historical survey covering all important stages of development of the early American drama; the second part contains translations of representative excerpts from seven covered plays. As such, it presents to the reader a systematic historical overview of the development of this rather neglected genre and an anthology documenting this development by providing examples.

This book offers the first comprehensive linguistic analysis of live text commentary, one of the most innovative online genres of modern news media. The study focuses on written sports commentaries in online newspapers that enable partial real-time audience involvement in the media text. Adopting an approach from interactional pragmatics, the book identifies the genre’s characteristic micro-linguistic features as well as its unique narrative structure. Live text commentary is shown to be a hybrid and multimodal text format – an internally complex form of media communication that combines elements of live spoken broadcasting, blogging, informal conversation and online chat. It aims to inform as well as entertain the audience: by using humour, banter and real or staged dialogue it seeks to create a sense of community among its readers – sports fans. The book will be of interest to many scholars in linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis and social sciences, as well as to all others interested in modern online genres, news media and sports discourse.