The figure of John Bull stereotypically personifies the best and the worst traits of the British (or English) national character. The perspectives adopted in John Bull and the Continent extend the meaning of the metaphor and take the eponymous juxtaposition as an incentive to study the variety of multi-faceted relationships between the two sides.

Contents: Wojciech Jasiakiewicz: Henry VIII and the Polish question – Małgorzata Rutkowska: «Strangely unknown in England»: Poland in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century British travel accounts – Magdalena Ożarska: Austenian inspirations for Maria Wirtemberska’s «Original Romance»: Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition (1816) – Miłosz K. Cybowski: First and last refuge: France and Britain as centres of the Polish Great Emigration – Michał Borodo: Billy and Casp: Rediscovering forgotten translations in Polish-English cultural exchanges – Tomasz Niedokos: Close encounters with John Bull: Polish narratives of disappointment with England – Douglas Root: Samuel Johnson and Voltaire’s «Petty Cavils» on English literature – Krystyna Urbisz Golkowska: Identity renegotiation in Charlote Brontë’s Villette – Dariusz Pestka: The influence of continental symbolism, impressionism and post-impressionism on British writers and painters – Adam Aleksandrowicz: Crossing the Channel with Julian Barnes: A brief (hi)story of fulfilment, misapprehension and disillusionment – Maciej Wieczorek: Living through the benign nightmares? (Re)contextualising in-yer-face theatre – Stephen Dewsbury: Two world wars and one World Cup: Attitudes and expressions to «the Continent» in John King’s England Away – Jakub Lipski: Radcliffe’s capricci: The prisons of the Inquisition in The Italian – Daniel Evers: «My heart is sore / For my own land’s sins»: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s relationship with Italy.