The aim of the lectures is to present the characteristics of contemporary literatures in English, to offer theoretical, critical and analytical models which can contribute to the more efficient teaching practice of the students. Topics discussed in the lecture series include but are not restricted to factors which shape the development of contemporary literature and the concept of contemporary literature; the importance of understanding contemporary culture; the relationship between postmodernism, post-colonialism, and contemporary theories; the relationship between regionalism and globalism, the view of contemporary literature on the past; possibilities and traps formulated and experienced by contemporary literary theory. The course aims to give a survey of literary texts belonging to the second half of the twentieth and first decades of the twenty-first centuries with a special focus on the fundamental issues and dominant literary solutions of the period. These include the interpretations and use of postmodernism, post-colonialism (John Fowles, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri), magic realism, historiographic metafiction, feminist vs. women’s experience novel (Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Esther Freud). The course also includes brief surveys of contemporary national literatures (Scottish – Irvine Welsh, A. L. Kennedy, Iain Banks; Irish – Roddy Doyle, Brian Friel, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague), and of the ethnic diversity of post-war North American Literature (Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Walker Percy, MacLennan Hugh, Davies Robertson, Native American, African American, Asian American, Hispanic American and Jewish American Literatures)