The teeming and bustling brilliance of culture. Literary variety and historical multitude of texts

The volume includes essays on the literary science and opens up to all fields of humanities, by collecting interdisciplinary dissertations. Antoni Czyż presents the results of researches from the borderline of the history and theory of literature and the history of ideas and spirituality, opened up to the history of culture. A constant background is the history of mysticism. The monograph includes the wide spectrum of phenomena from past ages to modern times. Analyses and interpretations relate to masterpieces of medieval literature like Bogu rodzica [Mother of God] (such a transcription was adopted by the author) and the Renaissance literature, works of the ages of Baroque and Enlightenment, but also phenomena of the 20th century. Among the authors are the neo-Latin poet Klemens Janicki, Jan Kochanowski as an author of Laments, the baroque female mystic Magdalena Mortęska, the poet Józef Baka and his Uwagi (the Comments), the poet Tomasz Kajetan Węgierski, as well as the thinker of modernism Stanisław Brzozowski, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Witold Gombrowicz, the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the Italian child and mystic Antonietta Meo, Agatha Christie who wrote about crime, the contemporary poet Kazimierz Świegocki, a cinema genius Federico Fellini and Andrzej Żuławski as a writer and film director, and many other phenomena...

The methodological inspiration for the undertaken work was provided mainly by Fernand Braudel and the concept of “long duration” [longue durée] of cultural phenomena as well as Martin Heidegger and recognition of literature as a trace of existence. Simone Weil and her idea of the rootedness [l'enracinement].