East-Central European traumas and a millenial condition

An international collection of experts present and analyze selected manifestations of the millenium-inspired sense of the ending as well as the resulting artistic motifs of diseases and degeneration. The essays demonstrate the complexity of traumatic conditions in the realm of symbolic representations at the end of the century of totalitarianism. Among the topics covered is a discussion of the "moribund legacy of Polishness" in Joseph Conrad; vampirism as metaphor in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles; and Freudian constructions of sexual malaise in Henry James' "The Beast of the Jungle."