In their opening essays, Myrna Kostash, Mirosłava Buchholtz and Ann C. Colley introduce the primary aims of Mosaics of Words. The three authors honour the memory of the late Professor Nancy Burke by emphasizing the complexities of a friendship, her inspiring passion for teaching throughout a writing career marked by a thorough understanding of cultural and political contexts experienced in her adopted Poland. Following the tribute paid to Nancy Burke's achievements in developing Canadian studies at Warsaw University, Mirosłava Buchholtz and Ann C. Colley explore Mirrors of Memory and Scorched Earth as poetry revealing an elegiac tradition that transgresses cultural boundaries.

Further, without having clear-cut sections, the volume serves as a wide-ranging series of articles that mainly deal with the response to both classic and contemporary American and Canadian authors. Many of the essays outline a transatlantic and interdisciplinary reception of authors such as Larissa Lai, Dionne Brand, or Lola Lemire Tostevin; critique the configuration of the frontier in North American texts; and analyse the related discourses on migration, bilingualism, and multiculturalism. Thus the essays examine the role immigrant communities played in writing literature in the United States and Canada and investigate the subsequent “poetics of cultural transfer” from a comparative perspective.

The authors explore the multiple representations of ethnic encounters in American and Canadian fiction or in poetry as symbolic of cultural negotiations among diverse backgrounds within challenging literary canons. Many articles offer fascinating insights into rewriting maps and spaces, and analyse discourses as “constructive writing practices” marked by specific literary strategies. For example, Marek Paryż investigates the discourse of imperial fantasy in Walden and Robinson Crusoe, whereas Wojciech Nowicki rediscovers Charlotte Lennox and Tabitha Tenney as representative authors of the early novel in America who “share the project of debunking female quixotism” (185). Thus these American, Canadian and European scholars approach both classic and contemporary texts as intersection of worlds and linguistic mosaics.

Finally, the articles discuss contemporary American and Canadian fiction and recent films which problematize the intersections between space, identity and aesthetics from multiple perspectives. The variety of approaches to diverse aspects of American and Canadian literary imagination, coupled with the results of the current collaborative research in the field, makes Mosaics of Words a noteworthy companion for scholars willing to challenge conventional approaches to the American and Canadian literary imagination and to explore the development of American and Canadian studies in Europe.