The text was created on the basis of interviews with Caltech scholars (Pasadena, USA) in 2018. The talks concerned various contemporary theories of biogenesis and the role of their philosophical premises. The researchers also addressed the issue of popularizing science. The worldview is shaped (and established) by popularizing publications. They also answered the questions how their personal beliefs influenced on research.

The concept of city has got broad analytical perspectives, one of them are: the structural perspective, sociological, psychological, political, cultural, industrial and also the pedagogical perspective. In opposition to the concept of city is the concept of countryside, within which the concept of nature is regarded as an idyllic place, it is the place of childhood, the place of longing, it is the lost place that has been starting to go under the knife of time since the 20s of the last century. The apotheosis of the concept of city, that is being practiced by many artists, embracing the symbolics of the concept of city by mass culture and later by popular culture, causes the necessity to take the initiative of conducting the research that would attempt to establish the identity of the concept of city in modern culture. The article attempts to specify how the concept of city functions in popular culture through the analysis of chosen texts in popular music, starting from the 50s of the XX century until the XXI century.

The text deals with the issue of “historical biography”. It aims to reconstruct the key concepts connected with the biographical publishing series “The Legacies of the progressive personalities of our past”. The text answers the question what conceptual framework surrounded and legitimised the edition.

The Epistle of Barnabas, usually included in the works of the Apostolic Fathers, is an anonymous text written in koiné Greek. It was probably composed between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second Century in an Egyptian or Syro-Palestinian setting. The text is made up of two parts: the first one has an anti-Judaic apologetic nature; the second one is instructive and paraenetical. The Latin version of the Epistle (L), which is useful in the constitutio textus of the original too, concerns the first of the two parts. An analysis of the language and of the technique of translation allows asserting that L was probably compiled in Rome between the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third Century. Moreover, its main features may be identified in the literality and in the linguistic and stylistic popularity. The literality is both quantitative and distributional: the changes are usually narrow (except expressions which introduce Biblical quotations) and concern parts which may be considered accessory by a semantic point of view. The popular style is due to the attention the translator pays to the needs of the sociocultural situation of the readers and is confirmed by the presence of rhetorical figures as alliteration. These two characteristics, which are typical of Latin translations of Greek Patristic texts compiled between the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third Century, are due to stylistic choices which are homogeneously and congruently applied. Moreover, in L these characteristics are strictly bound, because the sermo humilis characterizes the Greek text too.

The article attempts to prove that Darwinism in popular culture plays a role of a theory of everything. Bestselling authors of popular science such as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Bill Bryson have acquainted general public with the theory of evolution, and its newest facet — the Modern Synthesis. Darwinian paradigms, as defined by Thomas Kuhn, are also used in popular books on cosmology, sociobiology, psychology, and religious studies. Moreover, the Darwinian grand narrative of evolutional history shapes the way in which contemporary mass culture presents the history of our planet in numerous educational TV series. Last but not least, Charles Darwin himself has recently become a popular icon and the story of his life is remade in a growing number of fiction and non-fiction books and movies.

Marta Wrzosek from the Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw talks about the fascinating and complex world of fungi and examines the complicated role of language in science popularization.

This article outlines the rise and development of popular science periodicals in Poland from the 18th century until 1939. Their history begins in 1758 with the publication of Nowe Wiadomości Ekonomiczne i Uczone [Latest Economic and Learned News]. Our corpus includes 128 periodicals representing a great diversity of formats and content.

This article combines a general introduction to the crime fi ction of Walery Przyborowski with a study of the structure of the plot of his novels. The analyses of ten of his novels conclude with a typology of their narrative schemes, shown in the context of certain invariant patterns and the conventions of related literary genres. While the main objective of this study is to outline the structure of crime story and the social issues depicted in Przyborowski’s crime fi ction, it also pays some attention to the ways in which it refl ects his concerns about contemporary life and the condition of Poland under foreign rule. Basically, Przyborowski’s formula is to make use of the staples of the genre – mystery, adventure, romance – and the techniques of the popular novel. Moreover, his novels, like all of the 19th-century crime fi ctions, are clearly indebted to the conventions of the historical novel.

Twentieth-century historians of Polish literature (e.g. Henryk Markiewicz and Grażyna Borkowska) unanimously agree that Waleria Marrené-Morzkowska was at best a second-rank writer. It seems that such negative opinions are founded, fi rst of all, on the critics’ low view of her favourite genre, the popular romance; and secondly on a critical survey of her work written in 1966 by Irena Wyczańska for a multivolume Guide to Polish Literature of the 19th and 20th Century (Obraz literatury polskiej XIX i XX wieku). This article attempts to revise the established view of her fiction by analyzing some of works, i.e. two novels, Leonora’s Husband (Mąż Leonory, 1883) and The Little Blue Book (Błękitna książeczka, 1876), and the short story A Duplex Woman (Dwoista, 1889). This reappraisal draws on the favourable assessments of her work of the first generation of her readers, among them writer Teodor Jeske-Choiński, literary historian Henryk Galle and Piotr Chmielowski, a leading literary scholar of the late 19th century. In their view her work rose above the level of run-of-the-mill romances and didactic fi ction thanks to her skill in combining the conventions of the realist novel with plots of popular romance.

Polish popular-science periodicals have not yet been researched in terms of their overall graphic design and layout. Undertaking an in-depth assessment of this particular aspect was intended to follow the development of graphic design in the periodicals published on the Polish lands throughout the period spanning 1758–1939, with a view to identifying the most characteristic components that stood for overall visual appeal of specific publications, whilst pondering overall aesthetic and educational value of diverse illustrative material they offered to their readership. The article presents an outline of research into the graphic design of fifty such periodicals, highly representative of a popular-science genre. Comprehensive research results along with the accompanying factual material and tabularised data, which might well prove of some consequence in further comparative research, are available in a book format.

This article examines three aborted publishing projects involving popular science magazines from the early 19th century, two of them in Cracow, one in Kalisz. Their history has been reconstructed thanks to the publishers' prospectuses found in collections of the Jagiellonian Library.

This paper examines the coverage of women’s health issues, preventive care and prophylaxis in 19th-century Polish popular medical periodicals, in particular Dziennik Zdrowia dla Wszystkich Stanów [ Journal of Health for all Social Classes] (1801–1802), Przyjaciel Zdrowia [ Health’s Friend] (1861–1863), Zdrowie [ Health] (1877/78–1880), and Lekarz [ The Physician] (1903/04–1904/05). The authors of this study try to find an answer to the question whether those periodicals did succeed in giving women’s health issues the rank and status warranted by their significance.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in 1978, is one of the most interesting contemporary Swedish and European writers with a Tunisian immigrant background. His second novel Montecore: en unik tiger ( Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger), published in 2006, has got an epistolary form deducted from the exchange of letters between Kadir and Jonas. However, the main character of the novel is Abbas Khemiri – the disappearing, estranged father of Jonas – a figure close to the real writer. Khemiri’s book has got an innovative linguistic form and contains many erudite references to the phenomena of popular culture. It is also a complex portrayal of the different generations of (mainly Arab-based) immigrant and post-immigrant communities in Sweden coupled with a nuanced look on bright and dark sides of the Swedish state, model of identity and integration. This material is enriched by the examples taken from Khemiri’s novel Everything I Don’t Remember and short story As You Would Have Told It To Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each Other Before You Died.

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).