Known as the “queen of kitsch”, Hedwig Courths-Mahler [HCM] (1867–1950) wrote 208 novels for women, for whom she provided an escape from the stifling reality into the world of ideal dreams and feelings. The novels were set in the late 19th and early 20th century, with the spatial settings serving only as abackground for the events presented and usually not playing any major role in the plot. Novels that do stand out in this respect are those set in the Alps. Other types of space did not play arole as important as that of the mountains. In some respects the formula of HCM’s novels featuring mountain motifs reflected the poetics of Bergroman or mountain novel, a popular thematic variety of 20th-century novel. In line with the conventions characteristic of Bergroman, the mountains in HCM’s novels were not just abackground and scene for the action. To avarying degree they also determined the protagonists’ fate. Dramatic events like avalanches, storms, slides, falls into precipices, physical injuries, unpredictable disasters would crystallise their moral attitudes. Often the mountains would also provide abackdrop for their passionate romances.
The aim of the work is to highlight the vitality and functional diversity of biblisms in contemporary ‘low’ literature imitating everyday language. This article presents the results of the use dozens of lexical units. Sometimes biblisms are modified- most often they are mentioning modifications (eg. Man cannot live by bed alone ← Man cannot live by bread alone). Less frequently we meet shortening modifications (eg. pluck hair ←pluck the hair out) and developing ones(have some remains of oil in the head ← have oil in the head). These modifications can often be justified contextually. Biblisms used in crime novels usually emphasize the seriousness of the situation and they can also introduce an element of humor.
Popular literature has always been raising many different emotions and research issues. One of the research groups, represented by Piotr Kowalski, criticized popular literature thoroughly. A new wave of scientists emerged in the nineties. They tried out different research methods, criticizing popular literature (especially fantasy) much less than might be expected. This met with a huge degrees of scepticism from Kowalski who did not agree with those methods and tried to prove them wrong in his two last publications. This article presents Kowalski's views, in the meantime trying to argue with them.
Popular culture, now being a medium of social dialogue, has stopped being perceived as a register of “lower” existential experiences, and its creations became the testament not of a cultural degradation, but of creativity of its authors, who seek fiction clichés which offer a new look at the deeply rooted social phenomena. Thus, if it is done with inertia and awkwardness typical for the subject, its potential of “explaining the world” should not be underestimated.
How do people read popular literature? Is it possible to connect reading popular literature with category of aesthetic experience (what kind?), or – eventually – what kind of theory could successfully describe this relation? All those questions create a context of the analysis of the book Poetyka doświadczenia (The Poetics of Experience) by Ryszard Nycz. Its author postulates that literature should be understood as a form of the enunciation of experience. He circumscribes here an experience as a specific kind of two-way interaction between readers and their cultural environment, society or nature. It seems that a wide definition, which includes – for example – testimonies of community memory and private, idiosyncratic expressions – describes popular literature, too. However, the author of the article, precisely focusing on the motifs in Nycz’s theory, which directly or indirectly relate to popular literature, doubts its ability to read popular culture. He argues that Nycz’s formula, in fact, is based on modernist conception of high literature with its sacralisation, which eliminates understanding aesthetic experience as a form of pleasure or ludic involvement.
The paper is a short critical essay concerning the history of Polish nineteenthcentury fantastic and its relationships with Lithuanian and Byelorussian (Albaruthenian) folklore.
The paper concerns the didactics of literature in the postmodern culture. It focuses on the means and strategies of reading popular literature at school. Popular literature is still treated as inferior to high literature in the literary education. Yet, it may become an important element of literary education. Popular literature, which is closer to students, may be just as good tool to interpret our reality as high literature.
The article presents changes in attitude towards popular literature and culture in last thirty years, in which despised Cinderella became the almighty queen of the book market, and dichotomy in studying works of “high” and “low” culture gradually disappears, what may be seen also in the role of “mixed” genres. Analyzing methods of working on such works and reminding overviews of research on such works included in her book The Third One, the author critically emphasizes the impact of English-language researches on the present shape of Polish researches on popular phenomena. She also calls for taking up literature that lies between “high” and “low” culture.
One of the important problems studied by book historians is the fate of those titles and editions that have not survived to our times. These were oftentimes the most popular and most frequently purchased publications, very vulnerable to destruction exactly due to their popularity. The information about lost editions usually comes from the old book lists (inventories and catalogues of early modern book collections, 18th and 19th century bibliographies), as well as from mentions by various authors. Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba shows that information about the existence and typographical shape of the lost editions is also to be found in preserved editions which were published decades or even centuries after the first editions. The study draws on bibliographic research and editorial work carried out over several years. Its aim is to present a methodology that allows the layout of the today unknown first print of Fortuna abo Szczęście by Stanislaw of Bochnia to be reconstructed with high probability.
The article is an attempt to discuss a new, rapidly evolving literary phenomenon, namely the m/m (male/male) novel. The author poses questions: What traditional genre categories can describe this phenomenon? What narrative tools does this literature apply? How does this novel relate to traditional patriarchal romance? And how does it refer to gay literature and the theory and practice of the LGBTQ+ movement? To answer these questions, the researcher analyzes m/m novels from two perspectives. Firstly, in relation to the “traditional” popular romance, and secondly, in relation to gay literature. In her analysis, the author uses concepts from literary genre studies, memory studies, and queer theory. The article reconstructs the brief history of the genre’s emergence and highlights the change it introduces in popular culture.
References to the work of H. Sienkiewicz in the work of M. Pruszkowska (1910–1973) appear in two of her novels: Prześlę panu list i klucz (I Will Send You a Letter and a Key) (1959) and Życie nie jest romansem, ale… (Life Is not a Love Affair, but…) (1964). The former depicts the fate of a book-loving Warsaw family in the 1930s. The parents and two daughters constantly use quotations in their conversations, which come from their favourite novels, most often from the Trilogy. The sisters make their lives theatrical by impersonating literary characters and competing in the best possible knowledge of Sienkiewicz’s texts. The other novel shows the same family during the Second World War. In the conditions of occupation, references to the favourite fragments of the Nobel Prize winner’s works often gain new and surprising significance. The literary excitement of Pruszkowska’s characters is analogous to the experiences of successive generations of Polish readers.
The anthology Myths of Megapolis (Mify megapolisa), published in 2007, due to the variety of the presented short stories shows various perspectives of the metropolis’ life and the fears of its citizens. The article discusses and classifies these fears and analyses their connection with the substance of the metropolis itself.
Post-apocalyptic novel – a catastrophic branch of science fiction devoted to the vision of civilization ruined by some sort of a cataclysm – managed to form a separate poetics of space creation. Images of the presented world depend on the psychological shape of the heroes who are directly exposed to the extreme boundary experience. When picturing the landscapes of desolated metropolises, the authors use solutions typical for horror and adventure novels, the ex- and impressionistic traditions as well as techniques typical for grotesque and naturalism. By extending the paths typical for science fiction, the post-apocalyptic novel moves away from the main movement and forms a separate convention of the description. The author of the article tries to shed some light on its assumptions by providing numerous examples of urban landscapes.
The starting point of reflections presented in this paper is the talk which took place during my fieldwork on the cultural role of public libraries in Podhale region in February 2016. The subject of the conversation was the book ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ by E. L. James, read by one of the interlocutors. Describing its course and atmosphere I try to set it in three contexts: discursive, performative and institutional. By analogy to them, acts and narratives of reading appear as: cultural translation from Anglo-Saxon to Goral style, active experimentation with local cultural constructs and results of specifically shaped concept of readership animation through a library. The peculiar atmosphere of this institution as a place made in great measure by women and for women, remains influential as well. Such interpretation became possible by comparing the analyzed situation with the rest of research material, gathered with in-depth interviews and participant observation, as well as using the perspective of ‘reading as an action’, proposed by American pioneers of the anthropology of reading (Janice Radway, Elizabeth Long). The observation builds an image of public library as a place embedded in local systems of meaning, but on the other hand, favorable to socio-cultural innovations.
In this article, I trace the changes in the literary and material representations of the indigenous peoples of North America within the British sphere of cultural production. As a first example, I will give an account of the episode of the “Four Iroquois Kings” envoy at Queen Ann’s court in 1710, focusing on the resonance of such a historical encounter in popular texts and iconographic material. As a second example, I analyze the popular story of Inkle and Yarico included in Richard Steele’s The Spectator in 1711, showing its impact on the early Enlightenment reflections on colonial trade. In my conclusion, I examine the role of American natives in the scholarly works of the Scottish Enlightenment, in order to show how they were used as comparable types for the observation of the roots of European civilizations thus justifying the construction of the British imperial hegemony both geopolitical terms and discursive practice.
Zajączkowski was a historian and turkologist who was interested not only in language and literature but also in traditional culture, which was not so popular among colleagues of his own generation. He conducted ethnographic research among Turkish peoples in a very professional manner. The most important of his works concern the Tatars of Dobruja and the Gagauz people. His main monographs are dedicated to these two groups, their language, literature, traditions and rituals. Today, Zajączkowski’s works are extremely valuable and unique.
The paper includes a short introduction and four excerpts from the Old Serbian Alexander Romance translated into Polish by Maciej Falski. Tekst zawiera krótką prezentację zagadnienia filiacji Opowieści o Aleksandrze w bałkańskiej przestrzeni kulturowej oraz przekład fragmentów tzw. Serbskiej Aleksandreidy na język polski.
It has been two decades since Słownik literatury popularnej edited by Tadeusz Żabski and the monography of Anna Martuszewska on the meaning of popular literature were published, and we are today pleased to notice that “the third kind” has not only provided space for scientific discourse, but has also become one of the leading objects of reflection and didactics in the academic world. Despite constant efforts to build coherent and possibly capacious methodological apparatus to study popular literature, it is still hard to find a universal key to conducting research in this scope. This certainly is a consequence of reaching out to various disciplines and instruments developed by various methodologies, enforced by broad spectrum of influence of popular literature: from the text itself to all kinds of artistic forms (graphic arts, comics, cinema, media, new media) and cultural practices (ritualization, theater, performance). One of the research proposals is cultural comparability, enrooted in the American school of comparative study, which analyses the text within its entire cultural image. The point of interest is the moment of “reading” literary, cultural phenomena as well as other human activities in the world, based on their interactions. Comparability uses tools developed on the grounds of post-structural literary studies to confront the text with other cultural narratives, thus opening it in a discursive manner to other than literary interpretative contexts, which manifest their creative power and vitality.
The article focusses on a multi-aspect comparative analysis of J. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Taking into account the obvious differences between the works, the author analyses the hell of slavery and exploitation of Africa by the colonial states that built systems that created criminals such as Kurtz and Legree. The author presents the genealogy of Conrad’s image of tortured Africa, the prefiguration of which is found in Polish romantic messianism. The article also presents a similar reception of both works. First, they gained recognition, then in the postwar period, they were criticized for the forms of racism hidden in them, and finally, in recent decades, they have been rehabilitated by new readings. The perspective presented here shows how women’s popular prose covertly influenced Conrad’s intertextual tendency, both his poetics and the worldview of his prose.
Virginia Woolf and Her Avatars. Creating an Icon and Appropriating the Writer’s Image in Popular Culture and Literature The act of fictionalising the lives of historical figures, which is the major motivation for this article, has become a common practice and literary phenomenon rather than a short-lived fad. The author analyses several literary works that consciously follow this practice and incorporate Virginia Woolf, an icon and a priestess of Modernism, into the cast of fictional characters. Each writer, representing various tendencies within this practice, creates different avatars – literary representations of Virginia Woolf’s figure which either (partially) correspond or defy the image of this historical figure. Sigrid Nunez in Mitz, the Marmoset of Bloomsbury – ,,unauthorised biography” – appropriates the Woolfian invention of an animal narrator to fictionalise the Woolfs and their domestic life. Looking through the lenses of such an observer casts a different light on this historical figure as well as on the circle of family and friends who frequent the pages of Mitz. Susan Selers’s Vanessa and Virginia, likewise incorporating elements of a biography, focuses on the symbiotic bond between the Stephen sisters, highlighting their rivalry. In The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s literary endeavour and homage to Woolf’s legacy, the writer aims, through one of the three intertwined narratives, to recreate the last day of Virginia Woolf’s life. The author focuses onher daily writing regime which in turn portrays her as a neurotic figure, obsessed with death and how her work might be received. In Passing for Human and I, Vampire Jody Scott plays with the image of Virginia Woolf ad libitum, customising her vision to an image hardly affiliated to Woolf. Generically diverse literary works presented in this study create a multifaceted fictionalised portrait of Virginia Woolf that largely corresponds with biographical facts. At the same time, as in case of Cunningham or Scott, it shows abuse and misuse of certain facts in an attempt to fictionally authenticate the life of the real-life figure
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.