REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 20 (2004)

Cultures are variously described as processes of tradition building, of transformation, negotiation, adaptation, marginalisation and exclusion. They are characterised by the different ways in which they have developed their own systems of representation, of moral and aesthetic values, of behavioural standards, of everyday practices and have set up the institutional arrangements which make possible as well as restrict these processes. Both, the existing cultural paradigms as well as the ways in which they transform themselves, are time and culture specific. Openness or resistance to external influences, the structures of the relationship between various areas of cultural activities, between 'high' and popular cultures, the strategies with which they practice amalgamation and exclusion, recognition of indebtedness or denial of it, continuity and change - these are some of the aspects which define the structure of a particular culture at any given time. This volume offers a wide rnge of articles which not only tackle the methodological and theoretical problems involved in the attempt to define and analyse such patterns of cultural transformation, but also apply them to individual case studies.