This book of Dobrota Pucherová re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history.
Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of “tradition” have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21^st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy.
The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

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The collection The Complexity of Creativity has been published upon the occasion of the jubilee of the literary scholar, Germanist, Slavicist and writer Mária Bátorová, whose work it presents in its complexity across scholarly and creative genres. Besides her personal bibliography, it contains studies by Slovak and foreign scholars, creative contributions, essays, congratulations, pictures, and two interviews about her work at the University of Cologne, literary-theoretical approaches and creative efforts.

Renáta Bojničanová – Tamara Šimončíková Heribanová (eds.): Komplexnosť tvorivosti. Zborník príspevkov k jubileu Márie Bátorovej. Bratislava: Veda, vydavateľstvo SAV a Ústav svetovej literatúry SAV, 2020.  544 s.
ISBN 978-80-224-1837-9

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The edited volume Metaphor Research in Interdisciplinary and Interdiscursive Perspectives considers the metaphor as a phenomenon that constantly accompanies and forms our orientation in space, communication and thinking. Our reality is generated by and exists in metaphors. This process can be analyzed from various perspectives of the human sciences, depending on which we can find different answers to the question of how reality is constructed through communication. It is therefore meaningful to ask how metaphors (re)construct our thinking and behaving. The authors perceive the metaphor not primarily as a phenomenon of the language system, but rather as a unique interconnection between cognition and communication. This position is supported by the fact that the metaphor has been increasingly studied by using the instruments of cognitive studies and discourse analysis. Taking interdisciplinary approaches, the studies give unique answers to the question of how the metaphor operates in the field between cognition and communication, and to what extent it takes part in what we can call a coherent and cohesive picture of the world.

ROMAN MIKULÁŠ (ed.): Metaphernforschung in interdisziplinären und interdiskursiven Perspektiven. Paderborn: Brill /mentis, 2020. 457 pp. ISBN 978-3-95743-190-5

The collective monograph Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures analyzes post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe through the paradigm of postcoloniality. Based on the assumption that both Western and Soviet imperialism emerged from European modernity, the book is a contribution to the development of a global postcolonial discourse based on a more extensive and nuanced geohistorical comparativism. Together the studies map the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art.