Romantyzm jako projekt. O przedmowach do ballad (Mickiewicz, Wordsworth, Hugo)
Romanticism as a Project: On the Prefaces to Ballads (Mickiewicz, Wordsworth, Hugo)

Summary/Abstract: The article attempts to reconstruct Romanticism as a project revealed in paratexts – the prefaces to 'Lyrical Ballads' by William Wordsworth, 'Ballads and Romances' by Adam Mickiewicz, and 'Odes et ballades' by Victor Hugo. These texts are presented as manifestos in which metapoetic reflection intertwines with literary practice, and the ballad itself becomes a space of negotiation between tradition and modernity. All three prefaces constitute self-aware gestures – rejecting classical rigour through demonstrative acts of rupture, while simultaneously rooted in tradition. The comparative reading proposed here highlights tensions between revolution and continuation, nature and culture, declared simplicity and naturalness versus embeddedness in culture and literary history, folk elements and erudition, the variability of tastes and the durability of aesthetic values. As a result, it reveals the paradoxical project of Romantic poetry, based on the collision of conflicting tendencies and the destabilisation of unequivocalness.

• Details
• Contents