The essay argues that Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake is written in the spirit of the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition. The medievalist trope of primitivism is used in reference to the Anglo-Saxon culture and language. What characterizes the medievalism of the novel is presentism. Buccmaster represents both the Wild Man and the Noble Savage type. In the pastoral manner, Kingsnorth writes in the spirit of anthropocentrism and focuses on the social classes in the early medieval world that he “greens” in the novel.
The topic of Polish diaspora in Japan, a community with which Poles in Japan identify as Poles, recognize Polish heritage and connection to what it means to be Polish is one of important, but practically unresearched issues in Poland-Japan relations. From the 1970s a growth in Polish population in Japan can be observed. They began to organize meetings, establish formal and less official groups and have helped and maintained connections to Poland. This paper will focus on the post-war history of Polish diaspora in Japanese islands.
The collections of the Kórnik Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences include a set of printed textes by Jan Seklucjan with a handwritten dedication to Albrecht Frederick, Duke of Prussia (†1618). Their binding is decorated with plaquettes with portraits of Albrecht von Brandenburg- Ansbach, Duke of Prussia (†1568) and his first wife Dorothea (†1547). The article analyses both compositions, providing the following conclusions: they were made in the Konigsberg circles of the so-called Formschneider between the end of the 1530s and the first half of the 1540s. Between the period in question and 1565, wooden plaquettes (blocks) with these portraits were kept by the Duke’s court bookbinder, Kaspar Angler. After his death they probably belonged to the workshop equipment of his pupil Wolff Artzt, although it is also possible that they were used by a local religious writer, bookseller and possibly also bookbinder – Jan Seklucjan. Both works are examples of adaptation in Konigsberg of a specific formula of Renaissance book binding decoration, being at the same time a bookplate, based on a rectangular portrait plaquette presented in the centre of the cover. Compositions of such works most often depended on the painted portraits – mainly from the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder. Both Konigsberg portraits, however, are marked by prolonged proportions, a landscape background, and the display of coats of arms at the bottom. This fact should be explained by the painting models that were probably related to paintings in Albrecht’s Konigsberg residence. It is impossible to decide definitely whether they were made by a painter employed at his court (e.g. Crispin Herrant), or imported. Nevertheless, they are an indirect testimony to the existence of a gallery of portraits in the Konigsberg Castle, which was created on a long-term basis and with passion by the Duke of Prussia.