Feeders of the World. Wet Nurses and Social Reproduction

The article is an attempt to outline the history of wet-nursing on the example of France from the late 18th century until the beginning of the 20th century. The main aim of the article is to highlight the social and economic changes undergone by the profession of wet-nursing. This study explores the process in which increasing industrialisation and urbanisation leads to wet nurses becoming gradually subjected to what Karl Marx described as formal subsumption of labour under capital. Wet-nursing was one of the most important functions contributing to societies’ survival and reproduction, which is why at the turn of the 19th century it was commodified and transformed into one of the most alienated types of labour. These processes were accompanied by a series of changes in the social and cultural perception of wet nurses, notably by the so-called rabble discourse typical for the 19th-century means of racialising working class people.

Signs on Black Canvas, or Charles Baudelaire’s Aesthetics of Transient Beauty and Creative Melancholy

This article focuses on Charles Baudelaire’s poetics of negativity which exploits absence, blackness, negation, defectiveness, associated by the poet in a paradigmatic way with melancholy and the aesthetics of transient beauty. The basis of the proposed interpretation is the paradoxical metaphor of luminous blackness (a black sun, a radiance without source, a black star, a black canvas), which the poet exploits in his metatextual works. The paper focuses on poems in which Baudelaire approaches that which is beyond the limits of expressibility and is symbolised by blackness and emptiness. Baudelaire’s melancholic poetry appears as a poetry about poetry, a poetry that is paradoxical in the sense that it contradicts stillness, acedia, and creative stagnation, while retaining its negative dimension, rising up against itself.

* Praca naukowa finansowana w ramach programu Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego pod nazwą „Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki” w latach 2016–2021(Nr 0046/NPRH4/H2a/83/2016). Artykuł jest fragmentem większej całości, która złoży się na książkę Sytuacja Norwida – sytuacja Baudelaire’a, przygotowywaną w serii Horyzonty Nowoczesności. Na temat melancholii Baudelaire’a zob. też dopełniający artykuł: M. Siwiec, „Czarna przędza” Baudelaire’a, „Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka” 2020, nr 37, s. 211–230.

Henryk Sienkiewicz and Racial-Anthropological Criteria. On the Letters Z wystawy antropologicznej w Paryżu

This article discusses Henryk Sienkiewicz’s approach to the 19th-century “scientific racism” in his “letters” (press reportage) Z wystawy antropologicznej w Paryżu [From the Anthropological Exhibition in Paris] (1878). The paper proves that the writer’s attitude towards such anthropological criteria as the cephalic index, facial angle, skull volume, and hair shape was significantly influenced by Oscar Peschel’s work The Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution (1876).

Rehearsing the World and the Self – Montaigne and Gombrowicz

The article discusses intertextual, intellectual and poetological relations between Michel de Montaigne’s Essais and Witold Gombrowicz’s autobiographical project. The author shows that the Polish writer was inspired by the French classic’s open poetics and his concept of processual and interactional subject. Gombrowicz was also interested in more specific matters present in Montaigne’s work: philosophical praise of the body, criticism of scholasticism, opposition of the private to the public.

What is Multicultural Children’s and Young Adult Literature and How to Study it? Methodological Proposals from a Literary Studies Perspective in the Polish Context

The aim of the article is to present several methodological proposals based on literary studies in reference to Polish multicultural literature for young readers. The author discusses foreign theoretical concepts regarding multicultural works and their components and explains the key terminology. She discusses difficulties that arise when trying to apply these concepts and terms in research on Polish multicultural children’s and young adult literature and presents her own definition of this phenomenon. Finally, the author proposes four methods for researching this type of literary works.

Model of a Film Fairy Tale in the Disney Golden Age (with Later Modifications)

The article attempts to determine the constitutive elements of a model film fairy tale in the so-called Disney Golden Age and to examine how it was used in later works, both these created by the studio and those by unrelated creators. After preliminary remarks, the author analyses three feature-length animated films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). In these works, as he notes, one can notice a set of features that make up the classic Disney model of a film fairy tale. Next, the author discusses modifications applied to the pattern during the Disney Renaissance and Revival. Finally, he cites examples of cultural texts polemical to this paradigm which point to the cultural vitality and heterogeneity of the studio’s films.