On the contemporary literary map, the reign of magic realism is indisputable. Influencing authors from such diverse places as India and the Caribbean, magic realism has always been seen as an aesthetic poetic element as well as a political one.
Our guest of honor is Pauline Melville, an Anglo-Guyanese novelist, poet and actress, winner of the Whitbread First Novel award, Guardian Fiction Prize, Commonwealth Writers Prize and Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

The 2011 7th Literature in English Symposium invites scholars interested in literature in English with particular emphasis on Canadian Literature in English. We invite you to participate in the discussion on various aspects of magic realism, today
and in the past.

The broad areas of concern we would like to highlight include, but are not limited to, the following:

==magic realism in Canadian literary practice and Canadian literary criticism

==magic realism in its relation to Native literatures in English

==magic realism as a genre at the crossroads of modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism

==intersections between magic realism and other genres (the gothic, the fantastic, etc.)

==magic realism as an inter-cultural genre / comparative and transcultural perspectives on magic realism

Please email a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical note to the conference secretaries: kmart@ifa.amu.edu.pl and Katarzyna Bronk at kbronk@ifa.amu.edu.pl by January 25, 2011.