Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An international Review of English Studies was established in 1968 by the eminent Polish anglicist Jacek Fisiak and has been published continuously ever since by Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań (Faculty of English). It is devoted to publishing high-quality research in English linguistics, literatures in English, and broadly understood culture of anglophone countries. It carries original studies in all the above areas, both devoted solely to English and those of a comparative natures, as well as book reviews and thematic issues. New contributions appear continuously throughout the year on the online-first basis, while the yearbook is closed and printed in late December. The primary mode of publication is on-line, with printed copies reserved in principle for the authors alone. The journal welcomes contributions on all aspects on English studies as defined above, theoretical as well as applied. The language of the journal is English. The journal does not charge any fees for article submission, review process and article publication. Rejection Rate 65% JOURNAL METRICS: Ministry of Science and Higher Education (2024): 100 CiteScore: 1.2 DOI: 10.14746/stap ISSN: 0081-6272 eISSN: 2082-5102 PUBLISHED WORK ARE LICENSED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. DATA ARCHIVING The PRESSto platform digitally preserves the content of this journal using the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN), which provides digital long-term preservation of data and secured access to the content of the journal. The journal "Studia Anglica Posnaniensia" complies with the I40C standards for open citations. PUBLISHER Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Editorial Office Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University Grunwaldzka 6, 60-780 Poznań, Poland INDEXED IN: Arianta, Baidu Scholar, Cabell's Journalytics, CEEAS (Central & Eastern European Academic Source), CNKI Scholar (China National Knowledge Infrastructure), Dimensions, EBSCO ERIC, ERIH PLUS (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences), Google Scholar, J-Gate, Jisc – Open Policy Finder, JournalGuide, KESLI-NDSL (Korean National Discovery for Science Leaders), Naver Academic, Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, OpenAlex, ScienceON, SCImago (SJR), SCOPUS, Semantic Scholar, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory/ulrichsweb, WorldCat (OCLC)
A prelude to the Studia Anglica Posnaniensia special issue “America and deep time: alternate temporalities, geographies, and histories”
Copyright (c) 2025 Paulina Ambroży, Katarzyna Macedulska, Małgorzata Olsza, Elżbieta Wilczyńska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Housing crisis time in two graphic narratives: Richard McGuire’s "Here" and Chris Ware’s "Building stories"
The aim of this paper is to apply crisis studies, housing studies and hauntology to conduct an analysis of Richard McGuire’s Here (2014) and Chris Ware’s Building stories (2012a). These two graphic narratives address times of global crises by employing houses and other animate and inanimate characters as spectral figures to visualize both near and deep futures. The paper demonstrates how McGuire’s and Ware’s spatiotemporal structures, rooted in the local, the personal and even the small-scale, engage with the most pressing topics of our times. Building stories responds to the 2008 financial crash and the housing and other homelessness-related crises, while envisioning a mid-22nd-century America affected by climate change. The climate crisis is also imagined in Here through depictions of rising ocean levels in the early 22nd century, and of human extinction caused by a nuclear crisis in the early 24th century. Both works express contemporary anxieties about an increasingly inhospitable near future as well as the unthinkable, posthuman deep future. By situating crises within domestic spaces, the authors not only bring global challenges closer to home and raise an alarm, however. The paper argues that, at the same time, both books can be said to domesticate crisis anxiety by providing comic relief, offering not only humor, irony, and play, but also aesthetic pleasure. The aesthetic dimension is derived from the fact that, while addressing global crises, both authors overcome the crisis of form and representation by celebrating the medium of the comic book itself. The authors experiment with the medium’s conventions, radically employing its inherently fragmentary nature to construct highly non-linear, interactive works. The texts capture elusive events and present polycentric multispecies histories that involve human, posthuman, more- or other-than-human points of view. Although McGuire and Ware pursue this aim differently, they both engage in metareflection on narrative and time: from the eternal present of art to the planet’s deep past and deep future in Here, from the near past to near future in Building stories, and through constant change in both.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ewa Kowal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A fable for our entangled world: Reading Gary Shteyngart’s "Our country friends" (2021) in assemblage terms
This article focuses on Gary Shteyngart’s 2021 novel, Our country friends, which follows a multicultural group of American friends spending the COVID-19 lockdown at the country estate of Sasha Senderovsky, a Russian-American writer and “landowner.” Inspired by assemblage thinking and Thomas Newlin’s ecological reading of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1897), this study reads Our country friends as a novel that foregrounds interhuman relations in an entangled world. By invoking Anton Chekhov’s fin-de-siècle play, the novel opens up space for a trans-temporal reflection on a universally human affliction—a sense of wasted time and regret for opportunities not taken. Simultaneously, Shteyngart’s work taps into the anxieties of the present moment: the COVID-19 pandemic, mapped as a complex biological and political assemblage, and Donald Trump’s dysfunctional politics exacerbating the resulting chaos. Like Chekhov in Uncle Vanya, Shteyngart favors a deep-time, globally conscious perspective over a nation-centric one. Shteyngart’s protagonists are not immune from the world beyond the country estate but are instead embedded in several interconnected ecosystems: their immediate environment and the broader sociopolitical ecosystem of America, which in turn forms part of the global totality. Accordingly, in being at once deeply universal and painfully contemporary, Shteyngart’s novel is, to paraphrase Salman Rushdie’s words, a fable for our entangled world, which promises to remain relevant even as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes from view.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martyna Bryla https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
In search of black creativity and joy: Black urban space in African American picturebooks about the South Bronx
Moving beyond conventional thinking that equates Black space with fearsome locality or dysfunction, contemporary African American children’s authors define Black geographies as generative, joyful and secure. They offer alternative narratives of blackness by focusing on cultural achievements of Black communities, as well as the ways they transform the popular perception of their homeplaces. Drawing on the concept of Black Geographies (McKittrick 2006; Hawthorne 2019), which argues that Black people’s contributions to geographical locations have always been political, this paper aims to analyze two picturebooks about the Black community of the South Bronx: I can write the world (2019), written by Joshunda Sanders and illustrated by Charly Palmer, and When the beat was born by Laban Carrick Hill and Theodore Taylor III (2013). It focuses on verbal and visual portrayals of the South Bronx as an urban landscape that became the birthplace of hip-hop culture as well as a site of resistance. By analyzing nuanced images of the South Bronx, the article offers an alternative reading of Black urban locations. It conceptualizes Black space as a site to be discovered and a project to be constructed for a better, more just, future. It also argues that Black joy and creativity are necessary survival strategies for those who claim the space as their own.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ewa Klęczaj-Siara https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0