In the last phase of Franciszek Karpiński's life as a writer (the first quarter of the 19th century), he practically gave up poetry and concentrated instead on writing memoirs. This article tries to find out to what extent his autobiographical work, especially his Historia mego wieku i ludzi, z którymi żyłem [A History of My Century and the People with Whom I Lived], is influenced by an attitude characteristic of the sentimentalism of the previous century. As this analysis shows Karpiński's narrative exhibits both a sensitivity much indebted to Rousseau's autobiographical method and skilful shifts of tone, from satire and irony to various shades of melancholy. For sentimentalist aesthetic and poetics the continual manipulation of tone is a means of alerting the reader to the world's complexity. As in the novels of Lawrence Sterne, that complexity is experienced by way of careful observation of fragments of reality, defined by the subjectivity of the observer and the truth of his emotions.

This article covers a complex relationship between the Bible and English literature from, to quote D.L. Jeffrey, ,,the swift Christianization of Britain in 7th CE [...] down to the present 'post-Christian' era". The author concentrates on and discusses the most essential results of more than thirteen centuries of this spiritual insemination, dealing mainly with a depiction of the most essential motifs and themes and occasionally commenting on various works' generic and technical aspects. Although we see that almost every writer explored biblical allusions in one way or another, emerging as the most significant developments are Anglo-Saxon poetry, Medieval drama, works of the Metaphysical poets as well as those of J. Milton, J. Bunyan and W. Blake. Having reached this peak, literature seems to have started losing interest in the Bible, or rather instead of the mission to evangelize, it preferred filling the old purport with new words and ideas, the most notorious 'deconstructionists' being Blake and his Romantic followers, decadent Swinburne and such modernists as D.H. Lawrence or J. Joyce.

This article examines the problem of the significance of literature, not just folk literature, in Ryszard Berwiński's Studies in Folk Literature from the Historical and the Scholarly Perspective, published in Poznań in 1854. This subject was largely marginalized in discussions of this magisterial work because of what could seem as the author's inordinate preoccupation with demonology. This article looks again at his approach, which deserves a reappraisal. The discussion is divided into three parts. The first part examines the terms used by Berwiński to describe folk literature and texts that are connected with it in various ways, which for him and other 19th‑century researches constituted the essence of folklore. The second part focuses on those types of texts Berwiński regarded as crucial for the study of the sources of folk belief, while the third reviews his vision of the cultural and social role of literature in the 19th century. Together, these analyses reconstruct Berwiński's view on the functioning of literature in folklore studies and, more broadly, in the processes of the creation of a communal identity.

From its beginnings – in Poland it was the second half of the 18th century – the novel, a genre that eluded the distinctions of traditional normative poetics, had to face all kinds of strictures, not only in the sphere of aesthetics. At the same time, due to its innovatory representation of reality and its effectiveness as a tool of persuasion, it aroused a genuine interest among the enlightened elites. This positive attitude appears to have been shared by Ignacy Krasicki, whose work (not excepting novels) was generally regarded as a model of unparalleled literary excellence. This article re-examines his achievement as a novelist and discusses at greater length his first novel Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki. Published in 1776, it was the first Polish novel and the most interesting example of early realistic fiction until the appearance in 1815 of Dwaj panowie Sieciechowie by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz.