The article deals with the problem of historical writing. Up to our time methodologists used to believe that authors of historical works were exclusively historians themselves. The contemporary philosophy and literary theory rejects the idea of such an importance of the author. Other factors like paradigm, discourse or culture are admitted also into creation of historical texts.

The article is a review of te book by Urszula Topolska. The disseration’s methodological approach comprises an examination of response, based on the aesthetics of response and utilising institutional analysis.

The author of the article proposes a relational analysis of literary culture. Relational research treats the newest model of literary production as a set of complex relations between the author and his or her image, the text, economics, marketing, criticism by the work’s audience, the media, the technological framework, and so forth. These relations provide the sphere of possibilities for literature and its agents. Increasingly intricate relations are drawing the fields of literature, the media, and economics nearer to each other; these fields are becoming more accessible in order to facilitate the exchange of various kinds of capital and to create conditions for the development of literary fame and author brands. The relational concept of literary culture provides a better tool for the analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of writer-celebrities, which is key to understanding the functioning of the entire field of literature.