This collection of essays is focused on the topic of experience as a concept related to the US. The essays deal with a wide range of problems and types of representation, from experience as a component of various theoretical discourses through the experience of foreign visitors and immigrants for whom America has often been a place of the Other.

Andrzej Ceynowa, born 1951, is professor of American Literature and American Studies at the University of Gda?sk (Poland). His fields of expertise include African-American literature and culture, modern American drama, and the history of censorship in the US. Marek Wilczy?ski, born 1960, is professor of American Literature and American Studies at the University of Gda?sk and the University of Warsaw (Poland). His main fields of interest are American literature and culture of the Early Republic and the antebellum period, as well as the cultural history of New England.

Contents: Agnieszka Salska: «Several of Nature’s People/I know and they know me»: How American Women Poets Keep Meeting Strange and Wonderful Animals – Joanna Durczak: American Nature Writing and the Urban Experience – Zofia Kolbuszewska: Forensic Imagination and the Materiality of Experience – Tadeusz Rachwa?: Nearing Thoreau – Joseph Kuhn: Henry James and the Secret – Beata Williamson: Henry James, Francis Parkman, and the Jesuits – Bartosz Lutosta?ski: There is more than meets the (narratorial) I. On the narrator and the experience of fiction in Henry James’s «Beast in the Jungle» – Grzegorz Ko??: Forms of Power. Frost’s Potraits in and – Pawe? Stachura: The American Sybils: Prophecy as a Mode of Fiction Writing – Katarzyna Kuczma: Desert(ed) Experience. John Steinbeck’s and Cormac McCarthy’s – Tomasz Basiuk: A Logic of Interruption. Experience and Witnessing in David Wojnarowicz’s – Monika Wojdan: Confronting the Loss of the Dearest: Mark Doty, Assotto Saint, and the AIDS Elegy – Lucyna Aleksandrowicz-P?dich: The End of Neighbourhood: From a Shtetl to New York in Bernard Malamud’s and Chaim Potok’s Fiction – Brygida Gasztold: Introducing New Jewish Immigrants: by David Bezmozgis – Izabela Filipiak: : Alaska Made in Poland – Yuri Stulov: Traumas of the Past as the Experience of the Present – Agnieszka ?obodziec: Paule Marshall’s Tripartite Experience in and Its Fictitious Reconstructions – Jørgen Veisland: Memory, Time and Transcendence in Toni Morrison’s – Ewelina Ba?ka: Indigenous Experience in the Americas: Leslie Marmon Silko’s and the Prophetic Retaking of Indian Country – Arkadiusz Misztal: Articulating the Time-Experience: Scientific and Parascientific Images of Time in by Don DeLillo – Ivan Delazari: Suspension of Belief: Don DeLillo’s 9/11 – Zuzanna ?adyga: Captured LIVE!: Perception, Corporeality and the Televisual Apparatus in the Work of David Foster Wallace – Marta Koval: America as Home and Experience: A New Immigrants’ Story in Aleksandar Hemon’s Novel – Mi?osz Wojtyna: «Delirious unknowing» - Periphery, Experience and Story-Telling in David Means’s – Agnieszka Kaczmarek: Bill Bryson’s Search for Amalgam in : Experiencing America of the Late 1980s – Marcin Jauksz: Writers Abroad, Jesters Aboard. Mark Twain’s and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Accounts of Their Journeys to Each Other’s Continents – Yuliya Tkachuk: NYC by Dorota Mas?owska and Janusz G?owacki: Discovered or Reproduced? – Filip Lipi?ski: The Hopperesque: A Pictorial Experience of America – Ma?gorzata Lisiewicz: Romantic View on Minimalism. American Art in the Context of American Experience – Justyna Kociatkiewicz: Reality as Fiction/Fiction as Reality: Larry Beinhart’s Recording of the American Experience in – Marek Pary?: Iron Man Saves the Afghans – Aleksandra M. Ró?alska: Enemies, Tortures, and «Frontiersman» Heroes: Narrating the War on Terror in American Film and Television Series ( , and ) – Grzegorz Welizarowicz: On Blues Axiology – David A. Jones/Joanna Waluk: The Monroe Doctrine Historically and Its Applications Today: Success or Failure?