Introduction: The Past Informs the Future, the Future Informs the Past

Summary

This volume includes a selection of articles based on papers delivered at the 14^th April Conference, held in 2017 in the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University. The April Conference is a triennial international conference which has been organized in Kraków since 1978. For four decades, the April Conference has provided an opportunity to bring together scholars working in various fields of English and American Studies, and to create a much needed space for the exchange of ideas, scholarly dialogue and networking. Since the first edition of the event, the open formula of the Conference has been one of its distinguishing features, encouraging an interdisciplinary approach to linguistics, literature, culture, and translation studies.

The word “new” in the title of the 14^th April Conference: “New Perspectives in English and American Studies” is by no means intended to be viewed as antithetical to the word “old.” On the contrary, the underlying idea behind the Conference was to view the “new” and the “old” not as a dichotomous binary pair, but a merger, and to postulate the need for an interchange between them. Thus, the 2017 edition of the event aimed at the construction of an academic framework that would encourage a diachronic uptake on diverse phenomena of literature, language and culture – with a great deal of jouissance, delightful enjoyment of cross-investigation. The selection of articles in this volume seeks to reflect this idea. They testify to the extent to which the study of the past remains a creative act, an inalienable element of which involves the construction of a proper meta-language.

The 14^th edition of the April Conference was one of the largest in the history of the conference. It featured a selection of thematic sessions with 160 participants from nine countries, including Poland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Ukraine, France, Romania and the Czech Republic. The Conference also featured a numerous group of speakers from the US, who participated in the “New Perspectives on the American South” panel, the largest thematic session in the history of April Conference, which spanned the entire three days.