http://hdl.handle.net/11089/20430 2026-04-04T17:43:41Z 2026-04-04T17:43:41Z Fisiak, Tomasz http://hdl.handle.net/11089/20474 2021-06-24T09:41:52Z 2016-11-23T00:00:00Z

Timeless Radcliffe: A Review of Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014) Fisiak, Tomasz

2016-11-23T00:00:00Z Handley, Agata http://hdl.handle.net/11089/20473 2021-06-25T10:16:01Z 2016-11-23T00:00:00Z

On (Not) Being Milton: Tony Harrison’s Liminal Voice Handley, Agata The paper examines the relation between poetic identity, whose ongoing construction remains one of the most persistently reoccurring themes of Harrison’s work, and the liminal position occupied by the speaker of Harrison’s verse. In the context of the sociological thought of such scholars as Zygmunt Bauman and Stuart Hall, the following paper discusses the way in which the idea of being in-between operates in “On Not Being Milton,” an initial poem from Harrison’s widely acclaimed sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence, whose unique character stems partly from the fact that it constitutes an ongoing poetic project which has continued from 1978 onwards, reflecting the social and cultural changes of contemporary Britain.

2016-11-23T00:00:00Z Filipczak, Dorota http://hdl.handle.net/11089/20472 2021-09-25T10:37:50Z 2016-11-23T00:00:00Z

Intertextual Illuminations: “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by Henryk Sienkiewicz in Malcolm Lowry’s “Through the Panama” Filipczak, Dorota The article offers a reading of “Through the Panama” by Malcom Lowry in light of an intertext connected with Polish literature. Lowry mentions a short story “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel prize winner for the whole of his literary output. What Lowry stresses in his intertextual allusion is the perilous illumination that the eponymous lighthouse keeper experiences. The article contends that the condition of the lighthouse keeper anticipates that of the Lowry protagonist who in “Through the Panama” fears death by his own book, or, to take Lowry’s other phrase, being “Joyced in his own petard.” Basing her analysis on Mieke Bal’s idea of a participatory exhibition where the viewer decides how to approach a video installation, and can do so by engaging with a single detail, Filipczak treats Lowry’s text as a multimodal work where such a detail may give rise to a reassessment of the reading experience. Since the allusion to the Polish text has only elicited fragmentary responses among the Lowry critics, Filipczak decides to fill in the gap by providing her interpretation of the lighthouse keeper’s perilous illumination mentioned by Lowry in the margins of his work, and by analyzing it in the context of major Romantic texts, notably the epic poem Master Thaddeus by Adam Mickiewicz whose words trigger the lighthouse keeper’s experience, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose text is quoted in the margins of “Through the Panama.” This choice allows to throw a different light on Lowry’s work which is also inhabited by echoes of futurist attitude to the machine and the Kafkaesque fear of being locked in one of the many locks of the canal “as if in experience.”

2016-11-23T00:00:00Z Dąbrowska, Małgorzata http://hdl.handle.net/11089/20471 2021-06-22T09:39:24Z 2016-11-23T00:00:00Z

Images of Trebizond and the Pontos in Contemporary Literature in English with a Gothic Conclusion Dąbrowska, Małgorzata A Byzantinist specializing in the history of the Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461), the author presents four books of different genres written in English and devoted to the medieval state on the south coast of the Black Sea. The most spectacular of them is a novel by Rose Macaulay, Towers of Trebizond. Dąbrowska wonders whether it is adequate to the Trebizondian past or whether it is a projection of the writer. She compares Macaulay’s novel with William Butler Yeats’s poems on Byzantium which excited the imagination of readers but were not meant to draw their attention to the Byzantine past. This is, obviously, the privilege of literature. As a historian, Dąbrowska juxtaposes Macaulay’s narration with the historical novel by Nicolas J. Holmes, the travelogue written by Michael Pereira and the reports of the last British Consul in Trabzon, Vorley Harris. The author of the article draws the reader’s attention to the history of a rather unknown and exotic region. The Empire of Trebizond ceased to exist in 1461, conquered by Mehmed II. At the same time the Sultan’s army attacked Wallachia and got a bitter lesson from its ruler Vlad Dracula. But this Romanian hero is remembered not because of his prowess on the battlefield but due to his cruelty which dominated literary fiction and separated historical facts from narrative reality. The contemporary reader is impressed by the image of a dreadful vampire, Dracula. The same goes for Byzantium perceived through the magic stanzas by Yeats, who never visited Istanbul. Rose Macaulay went to Trabzon but her vision of Trebizond is very close to Yeats’s images of Byzantium. In her story imagination is stronger than historical reality and it is imagination that seduces the reader.

2016-11-23T00:00:00Z