The present book for the first time links the thoughts of modern Western sociologists of literature with an overall description of the literary activities, attitudes, and views in late eighteenth-century Poland. Inspired by the studies of Bourdieu on literary fields and, more particular, S.J. Schmidt's study of the history of the rise and development of the social system 'literature' in Germany in the eighteenth-century (cf. Schmidt 1989), the author tries to establish whether Poland witnessed the rise of a more complex and (relatively) autonomous literary field or, as Schmidt calls it, a functionally differentiated literary system in the age of the reign of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-1795). Functionally differentiated literary systems - systems in which an increased number of literary agents and institutions produce, sell, buy, and criticize literary works according to capitalist principles - are the literary systems of today. As most scholars believe, their origins are to be found in most European nations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Did such a modern literary system, albeit with certain limitations, rise in Poland in the years of the rule of Stanislaw A. Poniatowski? - this is the question the author of the present volume will attempt to answer. This volume is of interest to theoreticians and empirical researchers approaching literature from a sociological point of view, historians, and, of course, slavists interested in eighteenth-century literary developments in Poland.

Re-Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel adds to the dynamically developing subfield of reception studies within eighteenth-century studies. Lipski shows how secondary visual and literary texts live their own lives in new contexts, while being also attentive to the possible ways in which these new lives may tell us more about the source texts. To this end the book offers five case studies of how canonical novels of the eighteenth century by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne came to be interpreted by readers from different historical moments. Lipski prioritises responses that may seem non-standard or even disconnected from the original, appreciating difference as a gateway to unobvious territories, as well as expressing doubts regarding readings that verge on misinterpretative appropriation. The material encompasses textual and visual testimonies of reading, including book illustration, prints and drawings, personal documents, reviews, literary texts and literary criticism. The case studies are arranged into three sections: visual transvaluations, reception in Poland and critical afterlives, and are concluded by a discussion of the most recent socio-political uses and revisions of eighteenth-century fiction in the Age of Trump (2016–2020).

Published in 1719, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. German author Johann Gottfried Schnabel—who in 1731 penned his own island narrative—coined the term “Robinsonade” to characterize the genre bred by this classic, and today hundreds of examples can be identified worldwide. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the Robinsonade’s endurance, analyzing its various literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context. Contributors trace the Robinsonade’s roots from the eighteenth century to generic affinities in later traditions, including juvenile fiction, science fiction, and apocalyptic fiction, and finally to contemporary adaptations in film, television, theater, and popular culture. Taken together, these essays convince us that the genre’s adapt- ability to changing social and cultural circumstances explains its relevance to this day. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

The Polish Revolution cast off the Russian hegemony that had kept the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth impotent for most of the eighteenth century. Before being overthrown by the armies of Catherine the Great, the Four Years' Parliament of 1788-92 passed wide-ranging reforms, culminating in Europe's first written constitution on 3 May 1791. In some respects its policies towards the Catholic Church of both rites (Latin and Ruthenian) were more radical than those of Joseph II, and comparable to some of those adopted in the early stages of the French Revolution. Policies included taxation of the Catholic clergy at more than double the rate of the lay nobility, the confiscation of episcopal estates, the equalization of dioceses, and controversial concessions to Orthodoxy. But the monastic clergy escaped almost unscathed. A method of explaining political decisions in a republican polity is developed in order to show how and why the Commonwealth went to the verge of schism with Rome in 1789-90, before drawing back. Pope Pius VI could then bless the 'mild revolution' of 3 May 1791, which Poland's clergy and monarch presented to the nobility as a miracle of Divine Providence. The stresses would be eclipsed by dechristianization in France, the dismemberment of the Commonwealth, and subsequent incarnations of unity between the Catholic Church and the Polish nation. Probing both 'high politics' and political culture', Richard Butterwick draws on diplomatic and political correspondence, speeches, pamphlets, sermons, pastoral letters, proclamations, records of local assemblies, and other sources to explore a volatile relationship between altar, throne, and nobility at the end of Europe's Ancien Régime.

The important scholarly achievements of Polish historians remain largely unknown outside Poland. In Nation and History, editors Peter Brock, John Stanley, and Piotr J. Wróbel have brought together twenty-four essays on Polish historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, an era of unparalleled changes in every aspect of Polish life. From the late eighteenth century until 1918, the Polish state was partitioned between its three neighbours: Russia, Prussia (Germany), and Austria. Polish historiography throughout this period tended to focus on the reasons behind the old Polish state's decline and fall. This shaped Polish historians' vision of their country's past and created the burden of not only having to discuss the state, but the issue of 'nation' – its essence, its shape, and its failure. The contributors to this volume – from Poland and abroad – closely examine the role played by historians in both the documenting and shaping of Poland's history. While featuring different approaches, Nation and History serves as the most comprehensive work on Polish historiography written in English.

Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women’s opportunities and worldview – long before the various women’s suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement. The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.

As narrow, nationalist views of patriotic allegiance have become widespread and are routinely invoked to justify everything from flag-waving triumphalism to xenophobic bigotry, the concept of a nonnationalist patriotism has vanished from public conversation. Taking Liberties is a study of what may be called patriotism without borders: a nonnational form of loyalty compatible with the universal principles and practices of democracy and human rights, respectful of ethnic and cultural diversity, and, overall, open-minded and inclusive. Moving beyond a traditional study of Polish dramatic literature, Halina Filipowicz turns to the plays themselves and to archival materials, ranging from parliamentary speeches to polemical pamphlets and verse broadsides, to explore the cultural phenomenon of transgressive patriotism and its implications for society in the twenty-first century. In addition to recovering lost or forgotten materials, the author builds an innovative conceptual and methodological framework to make sense of those materials. The result is not only a significant contribution to the debate over the meaning and practice of patriotism, but a masterful intellectual history.

This collection studies eighteenth-century British literature as enmeshed within a dynamic intercultural traffic, participating in the import and export of literary and cultural forms. Eighteenth-Century Transplantations places this transcultural circulation at the centre of attention and presents its products in a unique configuration. Literary transplants into the British context, out of it, and their transmedial afterlives are set together in order to showcase the mechanisms of such cultural commerce. The term 'transplantation', borrowed from medical and horticultural discourses and evocative of eighteenth-century experiments in gardening, is offered here as a useful kinetic model to conceptualize the diverse practices involved in relocating a literary text into a new cultural environment.

A quarterly journal devoted to Russia and East Europe.