The body of a ghost : a Polish fantasy novella of the Romantic era (1822-1863)

The Body of the Upiór describes the story of the Polish Romanticist fantasy novella; an often overlooked, marginalized genre that was not the subject of a thorough monographic study so far. This book analyzes this forgotten current of literature in search of a new way to consider 1830-1863 prose and to offer an approach to the Romanticist fantastic that differs from the most often used phantasmatic‑psychoanalytic one. A considerable number of the studied works appeared in periodicals, almanacs, or collective volumes of the period. The authors scrutinized in the book include Józef I. Kraszewski, Henryk Rzewuski, Ludwik Sztyrmer, Jan Barszczewski, Aleksander Tyszyński, Józef B. Dziekoński, Aleksander Szukiewicz, Włodzimierz Wolski, Józef Dzierzkowski, Edmund Wasilewski, Lucjan Siemieński, and Maria Pomezanska. The monograph reveals in their works: - the thematic range of the fantasy novella genre, - the specificity of the narrative and subject strategies employs in the genre (subjectivity based on a lack, one that is dialogic or comic), - its agonistic, relational character, understood on the one hand, as generic dependence and "parasitism" on other literary forms - such as gawęda or romance - while on the other hand, as a performance of a conflict, a staging of a battlefield between different aesthetics and worldviews. The book consists of eight chapters. The two introductory chapters present a bird’s‑eye view of the genre and the methodological tools used in the main part, mainly the findings of Eric Rabkin (The Fantastic in Literature), Roger Caillois (From Fairy Tale to "Science Fiction"; In the Heart of the Fantastic), and above all, Tzvetan Todorov (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre). These authors propose an interpretation of the romantic fantastic as based on ontological uncertainty, the impossibility of determining whether a supernatural, impossible event really happened in the represented world or whether it was only an illusion, a dream, or a result of deception. This constant uncertainty about the status of events, playing games with the reader, providing false clues, compromising the storyteller, or proposing mutually exclusive interpretations, determine ways of constructing the Self and the narrative mechanisms used in the studied works. The following six chapters discuss specific issues: representations of the body, metempsychosis, the dialogical Self, class conflict, mechanisms of blocking the fantastic (understood as a negative, destabilizing force, akin to irony), the twilight of the genre, and the exhaustion of conventions. The work is interdisciplinary; it combines the literary theory perspective with that of the history of literature, along with anthropology, the philosophy of the subject, elements of sociology and folklore, and the history of medicine and psychology. This approach allows the studied works to shine in the broader context of the Enlightenment‑Romantic cultural process and of modernity, understood as an existential experience characterized by internal contradictions: one based on the dialectic of disenchantment and re‑enchantment (romanticization) of the world, the ambivalence of modernist acceleration, inventions, discoveries, and longing for the old, premodern world and its values. In this sense, the reflection on fantastic novellas allows the author to nuance the image of Polish modernity