Dreams, Nightmares and Empty Signifiers

Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. She is the author of a book study on Virginia Woolf’s novels (2006). Her main research interests are modernist and postmodernist fiction, semiotics of space and urban theory and representation.

• Contents: English country house in literature – Country house novel – Contemporary novel – Novel of manners – Gothic fiction – Metafiction – Julian Fellowes Snobs – Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child – Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day – Sarah Waters Fingersmith – Sarah Waters The Little Stranger – Ian McEwan Atonement – Toby Litt Finding Myself.

Configured against a rich background of the existing theoretical and critical reflection, the book Dreams, Nightmares and Empty Signifiers by Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga successfully attempts to integrate the often ambivalent ideologies and contradictory political stances ascribed to the country house in various critical readings by approaching it as an element of the semiosphere with dynamic shifts of discourses, values and meanings. Presenting the country-house topos as part of broadly conceived literary tradition, Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga boldly redefines the theoretical paradigms so far dominant in the critical discourse.(Jadwiga Węgrodzka, University of Gdańsk)