Canadian passwords. Diasporic Fictions into the Twenty-First Century

Wlliam Shakespeares Hamlet is perhaps the best known literary work of art to begin with an exchange which contains the demand for a password. As can be gathered from the following part of the dialogue, Bar­nardo is entering while Francisco is standing at his post. And yet, it is Barnardo who demands to know the identity of the person he cannot see well in the dark. Francisco refuses to comply and insists that the other man stop, and, as he puts it, "unfold" himself. The automatized activity of pronouncing a password is thus imaged in this brief exchange as an act of disclosure or even self-revelation. What follows is the prompt exclamation: "Long live the King! "It does well as a password (as an agreed upon sequence of letters or sounds); Barnardo is recognized and welcomed. Nevertheless, the meaning of the four words (as opposed to their graphic or phonetic form) remains excruciatingly ambiguous not only to the reader or the viewer of Shakespeare's drama, but also to the two sentinels. Long live the King!

Contents
Introduction
1 Post-words, Past Words, Passwords
2 Ghostly Transmogrification: Paul Yee's Dead Man's Gold and Other Stories
3 Mimetic Desire: David Bergen's The Case of Lena S.
4 Labyrinthine Manners: Mary Lawson's Crow Lake
5 Imaging Old Age: Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters
6 Migrant Authorship: Anne Ireland's Exile
7 Garden of Prophecy: Nino Ricci's Testament
8 Public Statement: Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe
Conclusion: Negotiations with the Living
Bibliography

Mirosława Buchholtz has been Director of the Canadian Resource Centre at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń since 2001. She has taught and conducted research in the following fields of Canadian studies: the reception of Canada in Poland, children's literature in Canada, film adaptations of contemporary Canadian fiction, comparative postcolonial studies (Canada and Australia). She has edited several books, including Obraz Kanady w Polsce [The Image of Canada in Poland] (2003), which was nominated for a Pierre Savard Award, and Postcolonial Subjects: Canadian and Australian Perspectives (2004). In 2005 she initiated a new series of books CANADIANA, and has since been series editor. Three publications have appeared so far in the series: Transformations of Canadian Poetry in English by Douglas Barbour (2005), a collection of essays Travels in/to Canada (2005), and Les proverbes anglais by Roy Fuller (2006). She is currently co-editing with Eugenia Sojka an anthology of Canadian cultural criticism in Polish.
Buchholtz Mirosława

profesor nauk humanistycznych, absolwentka uniwersytetów Jagiellońskiego (magisterium z filologii angielskiej) i Brandeisa (magisterium i doktorat z literatury angielskiej i amerykańskiej), od 2000 r. pracuje w Katedrze Filologii Angielskiej Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika (od 2007 r. jest jej kierownikiem), gdzie habilitowała się w zakresie literatury amerykańskiej. Jej zainteresowania badawcze i dydaktyka obejmują historię literatury amerykańskiej, kanadyjskiej i angielskiej, studia postkolonialne, recepcję literatury anglojęzycznej w Polsce oraz adaptacje filmowe dzieł literackich. Twórczością Henry'ego Jamesa zajmuje się od blisko 20 lat, jest autorką dwóch monografii i kilkunastu artykułów oraz redaktorką dwóch prac zbiorowych poświęconych różnym aspektom jego pisarskiej działalności. Jest członkinią Europejskiego Towarzystwa Jamesowskiego.