The Politics and Poetics of Friendship

“Friend or foe?” is a perennial question, key for the survival of all animals, including humans. At times demanding an instant instinctive reaction, it also calls for deepened critical reflection. This volume’s twenty-two essays by scholars from France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey explore cultural representations of friendship in literary fiction, nonfiction, film, and other visual narratives. Collectively addressing general questions such as: “What is a friend? What is friendship for? And what are its varieties, limits, and costs?” the essays examine a wide range of topics: friendship in theory from the ancient Greeks to poststructuralist thinkers, friendship from the perspective of gender, intergenerational and interspecies friendship, queer friendship, friendship between historical figures, and between fictional characters conflicted by class or ethnoreligious divisions. The volume features original studies of friendship between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, in Shakespeare, the WWI Poets, the Auden gang, as well as the meaning of friendship for Frances Burney, Frédéric Chopin, Jacques Derrida, E.M. Forster, Eva Hesse, and Mary Shelley, among others.

Ewa Kowal is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Her current research interests concentrate on contemporary literature, film and cultural theory, in particular the most recent responses to the latest economic crisis. Robert Kusek is assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His research interests include life writing genres, the contemporary novel in English, poetics of memory and loss, as well as a comparative approach to literary studies.