The paper discusses two characters of speculators as shown in two 19th century novels. Zola’s Aristide Saccard incarnates fever, chaos and prodigality of a provincial who has become a millionaire pursuing his dream of fortune. Guy de Maupassant’s William Andermatt is a banker whose extraordinary capacity of making money is based on rationalism, cold calculation and exceptional intuition. Despite all the differences, they both embody three basic features of a businessman: desire, will and power.

The aim of the study is to discuss the relationship of the crude oil price, speculative activity and fundamental factors. An empirical study was conducted with a VEC model. Two cointegrating vectors were identified. The first vector represents the speculative activity. We argue that the number of short non-commercial positions increases with the crude oil stock and price, decreases with the higher number of long non-commercial positions. A positive trend of crude oil prices may be a signal for traders outside the industry to invest in the oil market, especially as access to information could be limited for them. The second vector represents the crude oil price under the fundamental approach. The results support the hypothesis that the crude oil price is dependent on futures trading. The higher is a number of commercial long positions, the greater is the pressure on crude oil price to increase.

This article reflects on key concepts of historical thinking proposed by doctoral students and young researchers. Established concepts such as the social role of history, professional historian and (imagined) space are still important to the new generation of historians. At the same time, some new concepts are emerging, such as political exhumations, mass graves, motion, embodied historical research, ahistorical memory politics, websites as historical sources, critical heritage studies and heritagisation, treason, preposterous history – an idea taken from Mieke Bal, and “Supreme Peace” – a notion drawn from the Chinese philosophy of history. To interpret these concepts, I build word clouds as a way of creating knowledge involving non‑human factors (algorithms) while enabling speculative interpretations of the relations between words. The idea of a secure past comes to the fore and I therefore examine whether historical security and being secure in history could be considered important elements of interdisciplinary security studies.

The horror fiction of the Romantic Age differs considerably from its contemporary descendants. While generally associated with scary entertainment (‘playing with fear’), the Romantic Gothic often enough crossed the line to explore the depths of genuine epistemological, existential or political fears. This would not have been possible without developing its own poetics which drew its strength from a variety of sources. One of them was the speculative philosophy of history in its pessimistic and optimistic variants. They both fed the sense of horror and its literary transpositions. Moreover, they formed a positive feedback loop: anxiety over the course of history led to the use of the devices and registers of the poetics of horror, which in turn led to the amplification of the effects of the historical vision on the reader.

The aim of this article is to examine the influence of the contemporary speculative philosophy on the neo-fantastic fiction (Le monde enfin by J.-P. Andrevon). The speculative philosophy presents the modern world as the source of cosmological horror for the human being. In my analysis, I focus on two anxiety-provoking motifs present both in speculative philosophy and Andrevon’s novel: the end of the anthropocentric world and the beginning of a new, inhuman world, dominated by nature.