mgr Przemysław Dołęga

ORCID: 0000-0002-1862-372X

The topic of my dissertation is “From fantasy to realism. Development tendencies of the Polish ballad in the years 1831-1864”

In my text, I want to show as widely as possible the diversity of the Polish ballad in years 1831-1864. I want to describe many factors - both cultural and non-cultural - which the ballad was subject to during this period. I plan to prove the dependence of the vitality of the genre (a decline in popularity of the folk and fantasy ballads) on the changing cultural, social and even political realities. This will enable reflection on the relationship between this part of Romantic literature and the factors shaping the epoch. I will divide the pieces from years 1831-1864 into two main streams - a folk ballad and a realistic ballad. Within the former,

I will attempt to describe the problems of fantasy ballads, and ballad-parodies. I will divide realistic ballads into ideologically or patriotically engaged ballads with a thesis and into ballads about the realities of everyday life, touching both historical and drawn-out story-styled themes. I will prove that the “Balladomania” continued after 1831, but it took a slightly different form than before. I will devote a lot of attention to the artists' inspirations, I will try to determine to what extent the works they created were original and to what extent they duplicated the popular patterns in culture. I will also refer to the ways of depicting social, gender, and ethnic inequality in ballads. I will establish to what extent these patterns resulted from the trends of the epoch. I will also refer to the topic of strangeness and cultural difference in the ballad. I will specify how people of Ukrainian, Tatar, Turkish, Arab and Chechen nationalities were perceived by the authors of patriotic and godly romantic poetry.

It will be the first book devoted to the ballad of 1831-64, presenting a complete, monographic account of the development of this genre, its numerous varieties, various factors influencing its character and numerous, and mostly forgotten, currently unknown literary representation. I hope that this research will inspire other humanists in the future to deepen the presented issues, as well as to find new poetic meanings and relationships within literary genres. I believe that recalling in this work many forgotten ballads by the writers of minorum gentium will reawaken the interest in this part of national poetry and the ballad itself, as well as broaden the knowledge about the representatives of Polish Romanticism.

Publications:

1. P. Dołęga., Charakterystyka postaci a Facebook [w:] Lektura wobec wyzwań współczesności. W stronę edukacji, t.3., pod red D. Karkut., A. Kucharska – Babula, Rzeszów 2020, s. 184-194.