Published: 2023-06-29

The Unbearable Fragility of Being: Literature of Young Poland in the Light of Maladies of Body and Spirit

Aleksandra Mikinka Logo ORCID
Section: studies and essays
https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.13262

Abstract

The end of the nineteenth century was marked by a strangely affirming attitude to disabilities, diseases, and bodily deformities. From the Romantics, the artists of the Young Poland movement inherited a fascination with tuberculosis amounting to the mythologization of the sick; tuberculosis, or the “white plague,” was one of the favourite themes of the modernist studies of human disability and mortality. The turn of the century was also a time of extensive research into mental diseases. The naturalists, for that matter, equipped the great prose writers of the Belle Epoque with the medical conceptual apparatus and developed a sophisticated language of “clinical literature.” This article, focusing on several literary works representative of the Young Poland movement, strives to explain how, at the turn of the century, the experience of illness influenced
the texts of culture and, vice versa, how literature shaped the understanding of illness.

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Citation rules

Mikinka, A. (2023). The Unbearable Fragility of Being: Literature of Young Poland in the Light of Maladies of Body and Spirit. Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, (46), 97–112. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.13262

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Er(r)go 46 (1/2023)

No. 46 (2023)
Published: 2023-07-03


ISSN: 1508-6305
eISSN: 2544-3186
Ikona DOI 10.31261/errgo

Publisher
University of Silesia Press | Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego i Wydawnictwo Naukowe "Śląsk"

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