This article explores the motif of porcelain in Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, as well as in Dwa bieguny and Argonauci by Eliza Orzeszkowa. The cultural significance and characteristics of porcelain are traced through poems by Adam Naruszewicz (Filiżanka) and Czesław Miłosz (Piosenka o porcelanie), which, within the contexts of the 18th and 20th centuries, reveal a range of meanings associated with porcelain–its preciousness, rarity, craftsmanship, artistic value, remarkable durability, beauty, and fragility. Both Eliot and Orzeszkowa, alongside Hans Christian Andersen in the fairy tale The Teapot and Henry James in a fragment from The Portrait of a Lady, combine these extended meanings of porcelain into a symbolic code. This code serves primarily to analyse human values and existence rather than to provide a realistic depiction of everyday life. The porcelain motif thus functions to deepen literary observation through allegorical and symbolic potential.

This article explores the motif of the corpse-woman in Eliza Orzeszkowa’s novel Cnotliwi. It begins with an analysis of the complex relationship between the paralyzed Anastazja, her husband August, and the young Wanda, with whom August falls in love and whose feelings are reciprocated. The dynamics between these characters are primarily shaped by Anastazja’s illness and August’s conflicted sense of marital duty. These relationships are further complicated by the language of illness used to describe the characters and the grotesque depiction of Anastazja as a repulsive “corpse” who nonetheless remains alive. The novel engages with literary traditions such as Death and the Maiden, the virgin-corpse, and the Dance of Death, highlighting intersections between eroticism and the macabre, desire and repulsion. At the same time, as this article argues, Cnotliwi offers a distinctive realization of these themes within a positivist framework – at times adhering to the poetics of realism and at others transcending it.

This article addresses the issue of the materiality of the literary text, focusing on selected reflections on writing from Zofia Nałkowska’s Widzenie bliskie i dalekie [Close and Distant Vision]. Its aim is to explore the relationship between the author, the written text, and non-textual reality as presented in the source material, with particular emphasis on the text’s material dimension. Drawing on posthuman feminist thought – primarily the work of Elizabeth Grosz – the article proposes that the materiality of the literary text must also consider its non-human aspects. The titular “skin,” a term frequently employed by Nałkowska to describe a subject’s connection to the external world, embodies the complex, dynamic, and multidirectional relations between subject and world, and between discourse and material reality. These relations constitute the more-than-human mode of being-in-the-world, which, as demonstrated through the analysed texts, directly influences the status of the literary work.

This article analyses the typescript of Leopold Buczkowski’s novel First Splendour, which the author uniquely presented in the form of a scroll. It examines the relationship between the novel’s content and its material form from a media perspective, contrasting scroll and codex formats, as well as linearity and tabularity. The analysis draws on both the readers’ perspective and the cultural-historical significance of scrolls. On one hand, the scroll evokes the ancient Greek and broader classical tradition, which Buczkowski invokes within the novel’s content; on the other hand, it refers to Torah scrolls from Jewish tradition. The article offers several possible interpretations of why Buczkowski chose this form, suggesting that he reserved it specifically for novels addressing themes of extermination and war.

This article examines the topos of blood-stained gold as a manifestation of moral indifference. Within this framework, the Jew is perceived as waste, while gold is represented as a precious remnant – a noble metal symbolizing enduring life, eagerly sought and set into motion by so-called “diggers,” involving various “actors” (a term borrowed from Bruno Latour). The text offers interpretations of selected poems by Jerzy Ficowski and Henryk Grynberg, which portray the image of a “golden harvest.” These works attest to the sensitivity of Polish poets (notably written before Jan T. Gross’s Golden Harvest) and demonstrate poetry’s unique capacity to articulate the Holocaust. They explore themes of bodily presence and absence, attempts to materialize the dead through mourning, and the feverish, agalmatic pursuit of precious metals by gold hunters. The author employs hermeneutic methods and tools from cultural anthropology in these interpretations.

This article attempts to interpret Lucyna Skompska’s selected volume of poems Bez powodu from a materialist and Marxist perspective. Drawing on tools from Marxist and feminist literary criticism, I argue that reflecting on the materiality of a text requires analysis of both the social relations characteristic of a given mode of production and the question of the individual and collective body. The theme of “rupture” emerges not so much as a metaphor for the crisis of language, but rather as a figure of the possible – opening language and the world to a multitude of new horizons and embodiments.

This article analyses several texts and artistic works from different parts of the world through the lens of hydrofeminism and New Materialism. The starting point is the poem Water by the Polish Nobel Prize laureate Wisława Szymborska, which illustrates “premodern” modes of thinking and writing about water. The theoretical framework is based on foundational texts of hydrofeminism by Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Melody Jue. The discussion reveals intersections – or flows – between blue humanities, ecofeminism, hydrofeminism, New Materialism, and posthumanism. Several artistic installations serve as examples of water-material-ideological flows: Þjórsá (named after a glacial river) by Icelandic artist Borghildur Óskarsdóttir; Aquatic Environment by Polish sculptor Weronika Lucińska; ideological-material manifestos by the Sisters of the River; works from the Poznań event No Water No Art; the film Do ostatniej kropli [Until the Last Drop] directed by Ewa Ewart; and the documentary Dirty Waters directed by Folke Rydén and Ulrika Björkstén. The aim is to explore the relationship between affirmative and pessimistic strands of hydrofeminism from both planetary and local perspectives, with particular attention to the context of naturoculture in Poland.

This article offers a critical review of Katarzyna Kuczyńska-Koschany’s book Żydowie polscy, Żydowie nasze (Polish Jews, Our Jews), situating it within the broader context of majority-minority relations in Polish memory culture and the field of engaged Polish memory studies.