Theories

Scent of the Dragon: On the Poetics of the Senses in Travel Writing on China

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of interest in travel writing among scholars, shaped in large part by postcolonial discourse. Travel sketches have proven to be a particularly useful reservoir of material for scholars seeking to map out the ramifications of European expansion, as they both depict Europeans’ activities and shed light on the ideologies and motives that loomed behind the colonial project. (...)

Three Variations on the Road to the Far East: On Strategies for Generating Cultural Difference in Polish Travel Writing from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

As a branch of writing, travel literature poses a range of hurdles to any attempts at theoretical, methodological, genealogical or poetic classification. In a canonical reference book for philologists in Poland, Dictionary of Literary Terms (Słownik terminów literackich), Janusz Sławiński defers to the broadest possible definition for the genre, arguing that travel literature operates between two poles: that which is “fully factual” sits on one end of the spectrum, while on the other, we find contrived travel tales both realistic and fantastical. (...)

A Vertical Schema of Experience: Travel Writing from the Himalayas (Jerzy Kukuczka, Adam Bielecki)

One could argue that any exploration of the experience of travel, the sense of the world captured in transit and the intellectual tools used to conceptualize the traversed (absorbed, consumed, etc.) space (geographically, physically and culturally) must be foregrounded by first identifying the basic obstacles to articulating the nuances of travel and its literary and textual counterparts. (...)

The Golden Age: Overviews and Intersections. Eighty Years of Anglophone Children’s Classics and 150 Years of their Polish Translations in Three Macro Perspectives

In Place of an Introduction

The expression ‘Golden Age’ is often applied to the period of English children’s books from Carroll to Milne, and it is appropriate in more ways than one. Quite apart from the sheer quality of the books, one observes that many of them seem to be set in a distant era when things were better than they are now. (...)

Wartime Literature – Attempts at a Synthesis

Introduction

In this text, I take up a comparative study of wartime thematics within modern and contemporary literature. Until now, no work of scholarship has matched the momentum of Jerzy Święch’s monumental monograph in order to comprehensively analyse prose, poetry and drama pertaining to those “terrible times”12 Before I move on to more detailed statements, I will note a few basic observations indispensable for a comparative study. (...)