Though Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, two Man Booker Prize-winning historical novels by Hilary Mantel, ostensibly deal with the life of Thomas Cromwell, a chief minister to King Henry VIII, their major motif, I should argue, is that of disability, of illness, of bodily failure. As Mantel herself stated in an essay titled Royal Bodies, “historians are still trying to peer inside the Tudors, […] are they healthy, are they sick, can they breed?” She further added: “The story of Henry and his wives is peculiar to its time and place, but also timeless and universally understood; it is highly political and also highly personal. It is about body parts, about what slots in where, and when: are they body parts fit for purpose, or are they diseased?” (Mantel 2013). Bodily dysfunction appears to me to be one of primary thematic preoccupations of Mantel’s writing. Handicapped Muriel from Every Day is Mother’s Day, disfigured “Irish giant” O’Brien from The Giant, O’Brien, ailing Henry VIII from her Tudor triptych – these are just a few of a panoply of disabled/ill/afflicted characters that populate the pages of Mantel’s work.
The aim of the present paper is to examine Mantel’s 2003 memoir entitled Giving Up the Ghost which tells the story of the writer’s struggle with endometriosis as well as doctors’ indifference and medical neglect. I will attempt to discuss Mantel’s autobiographical account not only as a narrative about the writer’s illness, but as a work which investigates interrelatedness of writing and suffering, and which tries to both make sense and take charge of one’s life story which has been otherwise claimed by the demands and limitations of an ailing body. In short, I wish to see Mantel’s memoir as an exercise in autopathography.
 

Ornela Vorpsi is one of the most representative migrant writers using the Italian language. This article moves from the reflections of Édouard Glissant, who theorised the new situation of the world literature introducing the concept of creolization; it is also inspired by the ideas of Armando Gnisci, the first Italian literary critic and theorist dealing with the migrant literature in the Italian language. Particular attention is dedicated to the following themes: the condition of women in the traditional Albanian society, the author’s personal experience of migration to the Western European countries and her relation with the Italian language, very spontaneous and creative in its literary expression.
 

The Post-totalitarian Generation Syndrome in the Slavic Literatures of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in the Political Transformation Period in the Context of Postcolonial Studies. An Outline of the Research Problem

The presented article is devoted to the generational breakthrough and its role and importance in the transformation processes of re-evaluation of the colonial and totalitarian past in the Slavic literatures of the former Eastern Bloc. The author is convinced that thanks to this research attitude scholars will be able to build a new concept of the history of literature based on such determinants as: cultural memory, post-totalitarian consciousness, subcultural identity and corporeality.
 

It is indeed rare to consider Tadeusz Różewicz’s ‘lyrical Self’ as melancholic, but many interpreters and critics do point to the motif of ‘lack’ in Różewicz’s poetry. Naturally, not all lack must be related to melancholy: we speak of melancholy only when the loss breaks away from the object and attaches itself to the subject, becoming its integral part. In Różewicz’s poetry, however, from the beginning we can find yet another characteristic figure of melancholy. These problems are considered in this article on the basis of the later works of Tadeusz Różewicz in sections devoted to topics such as: the object of loss, the passage of time, ‘the birth and death of God’ as a double, the fundamental lack, the existence of the poet in ‘time’, ‘worthlessness’ and finally, the kulturkritik by Tadeusz Różewicz with a focus on repetition, melancholy and mourning.
 

Slavonic Studies, Thinking and Politics

Over the past quarter of a century Slavonic Studies, a geo-linguistic research and academic specialism, has gone through a series of major shifts, primarily affecting academic teaching. The multi-disciplinary nature of Slavonic Studies and its openness to new methodological inspirations have also repeatedly reinvigorated the discipline by producing changes in the nature of research into Slavonic languages, literatures and cultures. Importantly, such changes have not infrequently gone against the grain of prevailing political and economic patterns of influence. Vulnerability to political influence has long been recognized as a kind of original sin in the field, but this unequivocal realization has proved to be a paradoxical boon, making for a particularly clear-sighted and self-aware discipline. The paper focuses on this problem, asking questions about the future directions of research in Slavonic Studies. The intellectual points of reference in this paper include the thought of Hannah Arendt, Odo Marquard, Ludwik Fleck, Peter Sloterdijk and Michał p. Markowski.