Introduction: Seamus Heaney’s Europe

Seamus Heaney’s Europe is a space of contradictions. On the one hand, there is his belief in the principle of the national and ethnic identity understood in essentialist terms. On the other hand, there is a vision of the European tradition as multi-layered and devoid of clear outlines and a stable centre. The two moments inform Heaney’s work and are examined in the context of literary fascinations and interdependencies.

Forms of nostalgia in Henry James’s "The American Scene"

Henry James was not a sentimental writer. However, in his later books we can find traces of repressed emotions and melancholy. One of the most intriguing literary documents showing the nostalgic strain in James is his collection The American Scene (1907), a record of the novelist’s return to the USA after a twenty-years-old absence. It contains various manifestations of James’s nostalgia – for example, his memories of New York and his melancholic recollections of the places connected with his youth. Also, it shows James’s convoluted rhetoric of memory as a space of repression and displacement as well as his unwillingness to address these issues in a direct fashion.

Poszukiwanie pełni. David Jones i fragmenty pisma

Gutorow podjął próbę opisania i scharakteryzowania twórczości Davida Jonesa, brytyjskiego poety, malarza i eseisty kojarzonego ze zwrotem modernistycznym pierwszej połowy XX wieku. Podobnie jak inni moderniści, Jones postawił w punkcie wyjścia ponurą diagnozę nowoczesności – żyjemy w epoce wyczerpania się dotychczasowych narracji, w epoce duchowego, a więc i egzystencjalnego kryzysu, w czasie należącym do „ostatniego człowieka” (Nietzscheański Letzter Mensch), w świecie, który uległ rozpadowi i musi zostać złożony na nowo. Momenty te wyraźne są w dwóch najważniejszych i najdłuższych utworach poetyckich Jonesa: In Parenthesis (1937) i The Anathemata (1952), obszernych poematach, których frag…

Elegy became our song

Toward the incalculable :a note on Henry James and organic form

In "The Art of Fiction" Henry James writes: "A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts" (EL 54). Written in 1884, the essay addressed Walter Besant, a Victorian critic and novelist who promoted the idea of the novel with a moral purpose. It is quite possible that contemporary readers, preoccupied with James's refutation of the Victorian argu- ment about the didactic imperatives of art, overlooked this sentence. Today, with our knowledge of the writer's notebooks and in the context of the celebrated prefaces he added to the volumes…