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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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Slavic Review , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , Fall 2018 , pp. 685 - 703
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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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32. Ibid., 18.

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36. Ibid., 27.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., 95.

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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.