Nad rzekami Galicji. Szkic geopoetyki stosowanej

This essay is an attempt to put geopoetics into practice. The longing for the missing national independence must have been a major factor in the compensatory celebration of Poland’s landscapes in 19th-century Polish literature. Particularly striking was the Polish writers’ close bond with the rivers of their childhood. River imagery features prominently in the work of the most acclaimed Polish writers whose lives span the 19th and 20th century (Mickiewicz, Orzeszkowa, Miłosz). Geopoetics views this remarkable foregrounding and connotative richness of the river topos as a transdisciplinary practice; and in this way enhances the traditional explorations of the literature and landscape studies. In this article the geopoetic approach is applied to the literary representations and its historical and ethnographic contexts of three important boundary rivers (the Vistula, the San, and the Dniester). More generally, the aim of this analysis is to revisit and re-examine the spatial structures of the 19th-century Polish novel