Mediating the World in the Novels of Iain Banks

Katarzyna Pisarska is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin (Poland). She is the author of publications on contemporary British and American fiction, Iain Banks’s novels, and utopia in literature and film.

• Contents: Iain Banks – Mainstream Fiction – Mediation – The First Comprehensive Study of the 15 Mainstream Novels of Iain Banks – The Concept of Mediation – The Relationship between Character and Reality – The Wasp Factory as the Blueprint of Four Paradigms of Fictional Worlds.

«Katarzyna Pisarska’s Mediating the World is a pioneering attempt at a structural-semiotic analysis of Iain Banks’s literary fiction considered as a single oeuvre. All Banks’s fictions, she argues, are organized around the question of mediation between character and world, whether the mediation be social, impersonal and objective on the one hand, or individual, personal and subjective on the other. This insight gives rise to a typology of four different kinds of ‘world modeling’. All four, she argues, derive from The Wasp Factory, but thereafter one or other is dominant in each of the later novels. The result is a powerfully productive methodology for reading Banks.» (Andrew Milner, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, Monash University, Melbourne) «Depicting the variety of Iain Banks’s multiple fictional realities, his escapist dream worlds, lands of music and of memory, the universes of the past and of the future, mythical regions and apocalyptic quarters, Katarzyna Pisarska’s thought-provoking inquiry presented in Mediating the World exposes the full scope of Banks’s oeuvre characteristics: its paradigm of postmodernist fiction, its roots in Scottish literary and cultural tradition, its interest in history and, self-reflectingly, also in the story telling. The survey of the fifteen novels demanded from its author not only superior interpreting talent, but also outstanding erudition and remarkable industry.» (Andrzej Zgorzelski, Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Gdańsk)