The focus of this paper are the Joanna Pollakówna’s poems (especially the titular work from the volume Dziecko-drzewo / Child-Tree), which intuitively anticipate the exploration of the ontology of the dead body presented in Ewa Domańska’s Nekros; they speak of the posthumous existence of human remains, of their life-giving potential for the earth in which they are deposited as well as for the plants (especially trees) that will grow from them. The proposed interpretation attempts to bring out the revolutionary dimension of these texts against the background of Christian and literary traditions. The article distinguishes between the interlocking problem fields crucial for a non-anthropocentric reading of Pollakówna’s works, which includes the meta-poetic dimension of the texts, the circle of post-secular associations and the connotations inscribed into familial metaphors indicating that suggestions of interspecies affinities with plants may be taken literally. All of this allows us to arrive at a postulate of protection that resonates with Pollakówna’s other works devoted to trees.

This article develops the notion of plant writing or phytographia, the roots of which go back to the early modern concept of signatura rerum, as well as, more recently, to Walter Benjamin’s idea of a “language of things”and to Jacques Derrida’s arche-writing. Phytographia designates the encounter between the plants’inscription in the world and the traces of that imprint left in literary works, mediated by the artistic perspective of the author. The final section of the essay turns to the so-called “jungle novel,”set in the Amazonian rainforest, as an instantiation of phytographia.

The aim of this article is to provide a synthesizing overview of religious references appearing in contemporary nature writing and in discourses dealing with the issue of the climate change. The author emphasizes the importance and scale of those references, pointing to the lack of theoretical tools – not developed by “divergent”ecocritical and post-secular theories – that could be used to characterize this phenomenon. Focusing on the descriptions of mystical experiences represented in contemporary nature writing, the author refers to the psychology of religion and neurotheology to show the actual potential of religious paradigm of spiritual and mental transformation (metanoia) in the context of climate change.

This paper presents research on some representations of industrial revolution in literature and in the visual art. The category of anthropocene allows for a deeper insight into environmental aspects of an issue usually looked at from the points of view of the history of technology, economics or civilization as well as consumerism. The analyzed texts of European culture make it possible to notice representations of industrial areas as European hearts of darkness, evoking geographically less remote versions of colonial exploitation. The author stresses the necessity to take into account the opposition between the Crystal Palace and its critics, and the space of industrial output, transcending this opposition. It keeps being a challenge for materialistic cultural criticism, aiming at taking into account the issues of the environment and moving away from a strict separation of nature and society, which is crucial to the modernity. Hence, an important part of this paper is a proposition to redefine the economical theory of value, in order to take into account the value of such objects as raw materials and the energy they contain. Such view of the comparative literature of the anthropocene demands acceptance for the category of the longue durée taken literary: the industrial revolution might have a history of 300 years, but it still lasts and is present in new places on Earth.

The article introduces the concept of carbocritics – a reflection on the environmental, ecological and humanistic aspects of modern thinking about hard coal, the prospects for its use and the dangers of burning it and processing it in relation to human health and nature. Reaching for the resources of carbon humanities, I try to show that comparative cultural studies are a natural, overriding perspective of studying the representation of natural resources in visual arts and verbal narratives, thriving and successfully used especially in times of crisis, such as the aforementioned period of introducing the European Green Deal policy in Poland. The use of cultural comparative studies and carbocritics is illustrated by the analysis of poetry of Tomasz Pietrzak, Dorota Szatters and Jakub Pszoniak, authors who are biographically related to Silesia, who in the years 2014–2017 published books partly on environmental and carbon issues.

This paper is a review the book Anty-antychryst? Wojaczek religijny (Anti-Antichrist? A Religious Wojaczek), published by Konrad Wojtyła in 2021. The author conducts a criticism of Wojtyła’s interpretation of RafałWojaczek’s oeuvre. The most important factors, crucial to the final outlook of this publication, are analysed: research techniques, methodology, reconstruction of the current state of research and especially the relations between Wojaczek’s poetry and biography, as described by Wojtyła, definitions of key terminology used, as well as interpretative practices, observed in the readings of given poems.