The article constitutes a part of my doctoral thesis, in which I study the subject of curiosity cabinets in nineteenth century literature and culture. I analyse the motif of curiosity shop (as a variety of cabinet) in Prus’s Lalka and Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. This article attempts to show how the concept of the world built on the interpretation of peculiar expressions of reality influences narration, protagonists’ construction and text architecture.
Many researchers call the nineteenth century yet another epoch of geographic discoveries. Travel was associated with the development of knowledge and treated as a cognitive adventure. This article attempts to reconstruct the process of cognition described by Michał Tyszkiewicz and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski in their travel writings. I assign primary importance to the category of wonder. The article tries to find out what astonished travelers and how this kind of wonder influenced the image of the world they created.
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