The aim of the article is to analyze literary images of women who had an impact on the history of Poland in the historical novel Gambit hetmański (2014), written by Robert Foryś. This type of fiction is a popular variety of the genre, its main theme is the conflict between political factions fighting for power. The leaders of the factions are women. The article focus on the answer to the question: whether Foryś creating scandalous portraits of women who reach for power is a threat or a chance for them to recall and preserve their presence in history.

This article is built on the premise that the topos has become a potent unit of cultural memory, an image that stores a wealth of often vague, buried or forgotten ideas. Its contents, like those of literature, tend to become extraordinarily condensed and confl ated; in consequence, some topoi (in particular the Holocaust topos) defy conventional tools of understanding and analysis. A solution to this problem can be found in an approach which broadens the scope of the sources of the Holocaust to include pop culture; gives up the rigid classifi cation of topoi, based on ‘hard’, documentary evidence; and, draws on a conceptual frame that connects the topos with the mechanisms of remembrance. A practical application of this approach is offered here in a series of readings of selected passages from Marcin Pilis’s novel The Meadow of the Dead (Łąka umarłych), Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s crime story A Grain of Truth (Ziarno prawdy), Marcin Wolski’s alternate history novel Wallenrod, Justyna Wydra’s war romance The SS-man and a Jewess (Esesman i Żydówka), Krzysztof Zajas’s thriller Oszpicyn [local Yiddish: Auschwitz] as well as some poems by Jacek Podsiadło from his volume The Breguet Overcoil (Włos Bregueta).

Cwaniary (Female Wanglers) is not only a metatextual novel with numerous references to popular culture, but above all an important contribution to the discussion about the place and role of women in contemporary society. The author breaks with the nineteenth-century image of matka Polka, the Polish Mother, whose existence is confined to family and home. The creations and actions of the female wanglers in Cwaniary, outsiders who defy popular stereotypes by pursuing outré lifestyles, are underpinned with allusions to a nascent rebellion against patriarchy, systemic suppression of women's rights, and the resulting marginalization of women in society. Unfortunately, Poles still have great problems with openness to other cultures, nations, and non-heteronormative sexual orientations. The Poles, it seems, are caught between an irrational fear of disintegration of the structures of their relatively homogeneous society and the need to move on and reinvent themselves as the 'modern subjects' of critical theory. It is a choice between holding on to an anachronistic model of Polish culture founded on suppression or catching up with the 21st-century world of openness, diversity and multiculturalism.

Czarny Paryż [The Back Paris] is a crime novel written by Jolanta Fuchsówna, journalist and writer, and Jan Brzękowski, leading poet of the Cracow Avant-garde who lived in Paris, and serialized in the Cracow daily Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny in 1932, but not published as a book. In this article two typescripts of the novel are analyzed and compared with the printed text, taking note of all the corrections and amendments introduced by the authors. An integral supplement to this textual study is an extract from Chapter XIII ‘A Party in the Studio of the Japanese Man’ reproduced in two versions, 1) with footnotes and modernized spelling, and 2) the original text from the typescript with all annotations.

The aim of this paper is to analyse and interprete the prose text "Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen" by the young, German-speaking writer who as a child fled from the civil war in Sri Lanka. The paper provides an analysis of the contingency of language signs (like homeland, descent, native language, identity) which is a function of the experience of flight, exile, and live in the globalized and electronic media-dominated world. The central role in the novel is played by the relation between death and literary language and its communicative and perception function.

The paper examines the most important Italian historical novel and focuses on its principal migration routes, especially concerning main characters. It also examines a variety of representations of border and frontier (also in a metaphorical sense) in the novel.