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The contributions to this volume focus on issues of identity and communication in Europe. A multiplicity of regions and nations are discussed with regard to their languages, literatures and cultures: Scotland, Wales, England, Northern Ireland, Brittany, Scandinavia, Slovenia, Poland and even Japan. Problems of translating and interpreting receive attention in papers ranging from the cultural specificity of rules of communication and the cultural status of source texts to text structures and prosodic transfer. What emerges from the volume as a whole is a sense of Europe searching for a precarious balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces, between regionalism and nationalism on the one hand and internationalism and cosmopolitanism on the other.

Literary and social historians from Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany, Scotland, the United States, and Wales discuss nationalist tendencies and the search for cultural and/or national/ regional identity in literature. Although the main focus is on Scotland and the Scottish element in the New World, evidence from other nations/regions - Catalonia, Galicia, Ireland, Slovenia, and Wales - is included to widen the socio-cultural perspective.