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Modernism Romanced: Imaginary Geography in Jerzy Żuławski's The Lunar Trilogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2018

Łukasz Wodzyński
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Abstract

The article examines the imaginary geography of Jerzy Żuławski's The Lunar Trilogy – On the Silver Globe (1903), The Conqueror (1910), and The Old Earth (1911) – focusing on the relationship between the author's modernist sensibilities and the trilogy's adoption of the nascent science fiction genre. While modernism and popular fiction are usually placed on opposite ends of the literary spectrum, the example of Żuławski demonstrates that popular fiction was a valuable tool for modernist authors who sought to overcome the limits of realist conventions but were reluctant to alienate the mass readership. Drawing inspiration from the broadly-conceived spatial turn in the humanities, the article positions Żuławski and his work within the literary tradition that utilizes the romance mode (as defined by Northrop Frye, Fredric Jameson, and others) to reflect on modern subjectivity and its relations with what Max Weber called the “disenchanted world.”

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , Fall 2018 , pp. 685 - 703
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Harriet Murav and my two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on the early drafts of this article.

References

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16. Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Denham, Robert D. (Toronto, 2006), 136Google Scholar. Frye’s theories of romance laid out in Anatomy of Criticism: The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar, and, to a lesser extent, Notebooks on Romance, Dolzani, Michael, ed., (Toronto, 2004)Google Scholar are the cornerstone for modern scholarship on the genre.

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29. Ibid., 34–52. See also Stefania Skwarczyńska, Mickiewicza “Historia przyszłości” i jej realizacje literackie (Łódź, 1964).

30. For more information on Mickiewicz’s critique of nineteenth-century rational and utilitarian attitudes towards technological and scientific progress, as well as his ideas about the need for “spiritualizing science,” see Stankiewicz-Kopeć, Monika, “Refleksje cywilizacyjne poetów pierwszej połowy XIX wieku—‘Prelekcje paryskie’ Adama Mickiewicza,” Episteme. Czasopismo naukowo-kulturalne 16 (2012), 191–202Google Scholar.

31. OSG, 16–17.

32. Ibid., 18.

33. Ibid., 28.

34. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 136.

35. OSG, 60.

36. Ibid., 27.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 95.

39. For more examples of the femme fatale archetypes in the art and discourse of early modernism, see Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

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41. OSG 31.

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44. OSG, 27, 25.

45. Ibid., 78.

46. Ibid., 113.

47. Ibid., 146.

48. Ibid., 147.

49. TOE, 17.

50. Ibid., 136.

51. Ibid., 216.

52. See Tattersall, Mason, “Thermal Degeneration: Thermodynamics and the Heat-Death of the Universe in Victorian Science, Philosophy, and Culture,” in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Härmänmaa, Marja et al. (New York, 2014), 17–34Google Scholar; for more information on the significance of the heat-death theory and other forms of catastrophism for Żuławski’s imagination, see Miklaszewska, “Katastrofizm w twórczości Jerzego Żuławskiego.”

53. TOE, 188.

54. Ibid., 55.

55. OSG, 382.

56. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 121.

57. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 130.

58. OSG, 147.

59. Ibid., 173.

60. Ibid., 26.

61. Ibid., 204.

62. TC, 52.

63. McClure, Late Imperial Romance, 12.

64. Jerzy Żuławski, Na srebrnym globie, read by Roman Gancarczyk (Audea, 2010, CD MP3).

65. See, for example, Lem, Stanisław, Zulawski’s Silver Globe (de globe d’argent de Zulawski), trans. Kwasniewski, Elizabeth, ed. RMP. Science Fiction Studies 12, no. 1 (1985), 1–5Google Scholar.