‘Who am I?’ The answer to this question is one of the most important issues a human being has to address in life. This is a question about possessing the continuous self, about the internal concept of oneself as an individual. The self-defining process, the discovery of the self takes place in the context of culture and society. The impact of social experience is felt across the whole life-span. Socialization exerted by parents, family and friends, acculturation to stereotypes and limited and limiting roles, inheritance of local identity and cultural myths, acknowledgement of the legacy of history contribute to the formation of poly-identity comprised of personal, racial, national, group or gender identities. Unity in Diversity. Cultural Paradigm and Personal Identity is a collection of essays by scholars of multicultural experience who, by employing different interpretative strategies indicative of their different backgrounds and interests, explore the issues of difference and otherness, inclusion/exclusion and of multiple ethnic, cultural, gender, and national identities. Offering literary, cultural, social, and historical perspectives the collection will be of interest to readers studying contemporary literature, (popular) culture, gender studies, sociology, and history.

This book presents a selection of research papers dealing with the notions of travel and identity in Anglophone literature and culture. Collectively, the chapters ponder such notions as self and other, race, centre and periphery, thus shedding new light on a number of issues that are highly relevant in the context of the ongoing migration crisis. The contributors employ a diverse range of theoretical standpoints – from close reading to deconstruction, from historically informed approaches to linguistic analysis – and thus offer a nuanced panorama of these issues, especially from the nineteenth century onwards.

This book offers an examination of Scottish migration to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: numbers of migrants; patterns of settlement; laws regulating their presence; their activities; their social advancement into the Polish nobility; their assimilation and then the eventual disappearance as a distinct ethnic group in Poland-Lithuania.