This bilingual issue which we are now submitting to the reader takes up the theme of broadly understood travelling, being on the road, wandering, both near (not far from home) and very distant (into unknown realms of time and space). Travelling is associated with discovering new places, getting to know people and cultures, gaining experience, sometimes also pursuing a goal along winding and difficult paths. At other times, travel becomes an end in itself; it can be a way of life in which movement and change are core values. Not all journeys presented in this volume serve the purpose of recreation. Some were caused by oppressive conditions and threats to life and livelihood, which result in emigration, alienation and sacrifices that leave their mark on many generations. An inseparable element of travelling is the risk taken by the explorer. However, as the presented collection of articles confirms, journeys often become a creative impulse that leads to discovering oneself and one’s own culture in contact with the people one meets, with their customs and the places one gets to know.

In “The Art of Rambling: Journeys Through Space and Time”, Sarah LeFanu will look at the travels and travel-writings of, predominantly, Mary Kingsley and Rose Macaulay, and will boldly suggest some connections with the science fictional spacewomen and time-travellers of the second wave of feminism. She will talk about five travelling women whose lives span over one hundred years, and look at some of the connections between them in their lives and in their writing. By focusing on the experience of the five authors in a larger socio-cultural and literary context, LeFanu will trace the implications of writing and travelling vis-à-vis the intersectionality of one’s personal commitments and motivations, with the aim to discovering how these are inflected by questions of gender and gender bias, consequently bearing upon the shape of modern discourses of women travel and travel writing. While each of the women travelled in different modes and to different places, for every one of them the imaginative worlds of their childhoods inspired them to engage with the world outside, an engagement that was not just personal but was also profoundly political.

The increase in popularity of the Home Tour in the 19th century and the publication of many journals, diaries, and guides of tours of Scotland by, such as, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, led to the perception of Scotland as a literary tour destination. The tour of Scotland invariably resulted in a journal in which identities such as writer, traveller, observer, were created. The text became a location for the pursuit of a sense of place and identity. For women in particular, the text offered opportunities to be accepted as a writer and commentator. Dorothy Wordsworth made two journeys to Scotland: the first, in 1803, with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the second, in 1822 with Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Mary, her brother’s wife. This paper considers Dorothy’s identity constructed in those Scottish journals. Discussions of Dorothy Wordsworth have tended to consider her identity through familial relationship, and those of her writing by what is lacking in her work. Indeed, her work and her writing are frequently subsumed into the plural of ‘the Wordsworths’. This paper considers the creation of individual self in her work, and discusses the social and spatial construction of identity in Dorothy’s discourse in her journals about Scotland.

Persian Pictures, Gertrude Bell’s first published collection, differs substantially from her later works; critics have accused it of sentimentality, lack of substance – a mere ‘folly’ incommensurable with Bell’s later writings. In the present article, I intend to advocate for Bell, though, proposing to see the supposed faults of Persian Pictures as the work’s greatest strengths which in fact reveal the author’s other, more lyrical and less ‘business-like’, side. With special emphasis placed on the concept of gateways and walls I will attempt to shed light on how, by traversing and/or transgressing borders of various types and putting herself to a series of identity-forming tests, Persian Pictures – to the contemporary reader – offer insight into the broader apparatus of British (and Western) colonialism.
By linking each of the selected essays with one of John Frederick Lewis’s orientalist paintings, I hope to further strengthen my argument that aspects of Persian Pictures, originally seen as the work’s weaknesses, have the potential to actually enrich discussions of Western mis/representations of the Orient, without compromising its author, and should thus be approached as instances of powerful and vivid responses to the ‘shock of the new,’ as experienced by Gertrude Bell – and, in fact, many other travellers, male and female alike, who ventured into these realms.

Travellers’ discourses thrive on anecdotes. According to Stephen Greenblatt, they interpose between a series of similar, narrow experiences and a wider pattern they may indicate. This analysis deciphers how an anecdote from Passenger to Teheran (1926), the travelogue written by Vita Sackville-West, is not just an isolated flash but can indicate larger representational strategies. In her epic journey Vita Sackville-West travelled from London to Egypt, India, Persia, and then back to England, through Russia, Poland and Prussia; by boat, train and car. In the episode which is subject to a detailed analysis, the travellers were stopped at the Polish–East Prussian border and forced to leave the train. The consequences of what could be just an anecdote about an “unwelcome incident”, reverberate – as it turns out – far beyond the incidental because what is at stake at almost every border incident is a socio–political, geo–political, military and ideological reality. No matter whether such events are presented as adventures or in all seriousness, each border trouble has consequences beyond any “local moment”. To disclose some of the less obvious implications of the Polish–Prussian passage in Vita Sackville-West’s book is the aim of this essay.

The best-selling Austrian novelist Vicki Baum took ship alone for America in 1932 but emigration soon became exile for the Jewish author. The feeling of ‘Heimatlosigkeit’, or rootlessness, which oppressed Baum at that time was emotional and spiritual rather than physical. Child of a Jewish immigrant family in the anti Semitic society of nineteenth-century Vienna, Vicki Baum had long questioned the loci and the politics of Heimat, a German term whose significance far exceeds the simple definition of home or homeland. Cut loose from Heimat, she began her travels to far-away destinations, seeking to identify a common humanity and the universal moralities which could guide Europe to a better future. She wrote her travel experiences into novels which allowed her to narrate the landscapes and customs but also the inner lives of the peoples she encountered. A long-standing belief in the inauthenticity of verbal communication encouraged her to transcend linguistic barriers with confidence but it was her gender, she believed, which enabled her to share and interpret other cultures. Commonality rather than difference is the focus of her travel-letters and their fictional transpositions. Focusing on Baum’s experiences on Bali seen in a postcolonial perspective, the article argues that the island was for the novelist a space of transcendence, where the inhabitants held on to values already lost in Western societies.

Eavan Boland’s poem “The Journey” depicts the dream of a woman, who – just like Inanna, a Sumerian goddess – embarks on the eponymous journey into the underworld, guided by Sappho. At first, she sees nothing in the darkness, yet, having accustomed to it, she observes mothers and children in loving embraces: the image which is immediately disturbed by the female’s guide, who makes the persona realise that these people are the victims of an unspecified plague. At this moment, the woman, stricken with terror, notices the signs of sickness and death; among others, she sees infants being poisoned during breast feeding. Sappho stresses that the watched mothers have a lot in common with the speaker – they are all loving and caring, despite their occupation or status, but also despite the tragedy they participate in. In this feminine transfiguration of The Aeneid, the terrified lyrical subject expresses the wish to provide a testimony on their behalf; however, Sappho assures her that she is here precisely in order to gain this knowledge of her genesis. When the woman finally returns to reality, everything remains as it was, but she feels the difference nonetheless; she is deeply affected by the events she has seen.
The aim of my paper is to analyse Eavan Boland’s take on the path towards femininity in the context of Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial theory. What Ettinger proposes is a supplement to Freudian-Lacanian approach, which makes it possible to conceive of a new, feminine-based, non-binary matrixial difference, grounded upon proximity, hospitality, and exchange instead of a set of separations and the male/female opposition. I will endeavour to prove that Ettingerian psychoanalysis and Boland’s piece, when combined, can unfold the potential of a matrixial journey towards becoming a woman, grounded upon such notions as compassion, fragility, wit(h)nessing, exchange, connectivity, and transsubjective experience, unthinkable from the Oedipal perspective.

The motif of journey constitutes one of the most important cornerstones of both postcolonial literatures and science fiction narratives, the latter of which owe a significant debt to the essentially colonial origins of the genre, thus inviting postcolonial practices of reimagining and writing back. For that reason, the following article aims at an examination of the peculiar ties between the postcolonial theory and science fiction, in order to discuss how speculative fiction allows for an in-depth analysis of the contemporary diasporic condition and the issues of memory and cultural identity, in the context of a dialogue with contemporary diaspora studies and postcolonial studies.
The motif of the journey, then, understood both in literal and metaphoric terms, becomes the point of departure for a discussion concerning the ways in which the experiences of migration and diasporic existence influence the subject’s identity as well as their relationship with the culture and language of the country of their ancestors.
To this end, the paper aims at a thorough analysis of the ways in which Larissa Lai, in her novel Salt Fish Girl, engages in a discussion regarding the contemporary condition of diasporic communities, proposing a new perspective on the complicated relationship between diasporas, their past and ancestral heritage as well as their language, and the motif of journey, understood both spatially (as a journey from one place to another) and temporally (as a journey back to the roots or the impossibility of going back). Employing postcolonial theory as well as the theory of science fiction as the methodological framework, the paper argues that for Lai, the journey of one of the incarnations of the protagonist, Nu Wa, to the Island of Mist and Forgetfulness constitutes an extended metaphor for the experience of Chinese immigrants in Canada. The motif of journey is inextricably tied here with the practices of remembering and forgetting, crucial for diasporic communities, as well as the constant search for a new, hyphenated identity in the new reality. Moreover, Lai suggests that such a journey constitutes a traumatic experience for the individual, which results in the loss of access to ancestral heritage as well as the language and the necessity of accepting one’s liminal condition, which contributes to the feeling of alienation and rootlessness.

Unlike most of the immigration novels created by contemporary Polish American female writers, How to Get into the Twin Palms written by Karolina Waclawiak, does not focus on the hardships of assimilation into American culture but depicts experiments with ethnic cross-dressing. Waclawiak, a representative of the so-called one-and-a half generation of Polish immigrants from the 1980s Solidarity wave, reinvents the immigration story as her protagonist, Zosia, a Polish American resident of Los Angeles, yearns to become Russian in order to be granted entrance to the mysterious and appealing Russian nightclub. The protagonist’s transformation into Anya goes hand in hand with her exploration of the City of Angels, the
postmodern megalopolis with neon lights and pavements reaching the horizon. Thus, Zosia/Anya becomes a Californian flâneuse, the urban scrutinizer and strolling observer of the what is known as the most photographed but least photogenic city in the United States. In this context, the main aim of this presentation will be to explore Californian flânerie in Waclawiak’s novel: while walking down the city streets the narrator flâneuse reflects on her home (Polish) culture, underscores her status as an immigrant outsider, and delves into the questions of alienation as well as defamiliarization. Hence, one may assume that flânerie itself contributes to the transformation of Waclawiak’s protagonist.

Using the example of her novel, Call of The Undertow, published in 2013, Linda Cracknell writes about how repeated walks in a new place rich with possibility resulted in a fictional narrative out of observation and sensation. She also draws on her non-fiction book, Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, a book described as a combination of ‘memoir, travelogue and literary meditation’, inspired by re-treading former journeys on foot taken by herself or by others.
Both books have involved a ‘multiple gaze’ across nature, social history, communities and inner lives, and share some creative methods. In both she’s attracted to liminal worlds, exploration and often to women who challenge boundaries. Motion is necessary to this writer’s imaginative writing, but in Doubling Back, the motion has itself become the subject. For the writer, the craft is similar but fiction feels a greater transformation of the material. For the reader, which kind of text provides a more visceral experience of having travelled herself, and is it necessary for the reader to be a walker in order to fully engage with accounts of journeys on foot?

The paper addresses the issue of discrimination against women in the world of cinema. The author examines the successive stages of the struggle pursued by women of cinema for equality and fair treatment in an industry dominated and ruled by men. The discussion covers the most important campaigns and movements challenging gender discrimination, such as #MeToo in the U.S. or the European #nobodysdoll, as well as watershed events from the author’s point of view, including the Oscar for Kathryn Bigelow – the first woman in history to receive the award for best director, Harvey Weinstein’s conviction for sexual assault, and the leak of Sony’s confidential financial documents. The public disclosure of these facts triggered a process that should be referred to as gender equalisation in the film industry. The author also takes a look at the latest events in the industry, such as Agnieszka Holland’s election as president of the European Film Academy. In addition, the paper also comments on the aspect of feminine nouns in Polish and the attitude towards them on the part of the women they are supposed to describe. Information is provided on the U.S. and European cinema markets, as well as some diagnoses of problems appearing so far and suggested solutions.

A distinct strand has differentiated itself in television programming in the twenty-first century: television series that feature female protagonists travelling between parallel worlds. The worlds in most of these series are on the edge of destruction through terrorism, war or another traumatic event. The female protagonists, who share the special ability to travel between the worlds, have a unique role to play – they serve as mediators between the universes. Their inbetweenness enables their autonomy and resistance to violence, death, and appropriation. This role is played by Audrey Parker (Emily Rose) in the fantasy/supernatural drama Haven. Audrey’s task is to travel through an interdimensional portal to the town of Haven every twenty-seven years to help as a police officer to protect the inhabitants who are plagued by “the Troubles,” that is, supernatural abilities, which finally threaten them with imminent destruction. The uniqueness of Audrey resides not only in her special status as a traveller between the worlds but also in her identity, which consists of many segments in which different consciousnesses inhabit the same non-ageing body over five hundred years. The essay will analyse the unique temporality of the character, governed by female patterns of travel and her nomadic subjectivity, proposing that her figure links human lifetimes to geological aeons, symbolised by aether, the primary substance of the Void, located between the worlds. That link makes Haven a show of the Anthropocene, the geologic time period defined by humanity’s influence upon the earth. The Anthropocene challenges us to think beyond the usual temporality of a human lifespan, and so does Haven. The imminent destruction as a result of individual egotism leading to the misuse of aether in the show is a trope for the destruction of our planet. Haven uses the figure of Audrey Parker to represent a network of connections and repercussions dispersed over centuries to illustrate how our cumulative actions impact our planet. The show’s anti-linear strategies thus address the environmental concerns of an increasingly unstable environment to propose new ways through which to figure and address imminent threats concerning ecological disaster.

When Lara Croft travels, she travels light – sans suitcase, but in most cases with enough firepower to take opposing forces ranging from dinosaurs to bloodthirsty locals. However, her big guns seems often unnecessary titillation, for she can manage very well without them thanks to her exquisite acrobatic and hand-to-hand combat skills. She will vault over any obstacle, swim across rapid flowing rivers and abseil the steepest ravines. Lara Croft’s travels are often as physical as the virtual world would allow. That physicality returns our attention to the oft forgotten aspect of travelling namely the body of the traveller, not only defined by its position in space, but also by the ordinary and extraordinary circumstances of its biological interaction with the surrounding environment.
In this paper I would like to explore the interplay between the body of the traveller and contexts it is located in. These contexts range from the narrative and gameplay aspects of the Tomb Raider series, but also go beyond the border of the game and are realised in the transformative and reflective cultural milieu of the game. In particular I want to focus on the representations of Lara Croft as an archetypal “action girl” and “adventurer archaeologist” and how these representations are realised in reference to the changing (maturing?) video game environments. In the framework of postcolonial and ecocritical theories I want to explore the dyads of body/the purported exotic, body/natural environment, as well as physical/mental aspects of travelling.

In this article the author examines the way women are presented in travel accounts about Iceland written by men (e.g. Daniel Vetter, Edmund Chojecki and Ferdynand Goetel) and explores women’s writing about Iceland in Polish literature. This topic has not been studied academically so far. The article presents a chronological and synthetic review of primary sources. Selected feminist literary criticism is used to take stock of the material. Depictions of the female experience and the poetics of female writing about Iceland appeared in the creative practice of Polish authors as late as 1977 (the first women’s account was by Halina Ogrodzińska), only to develop considerably (both quantitatively and qualitatively) in recent years in numerous travel books by Magdalena Anna Węcławiak and Agnieszka Rezler, among others, or a project on the borderline between visual arts and artist’s book by Sonia Rammer. This review shows that the practice of women’s writing about Iceland has developed in recent years and requires detailed analysis and interpretation. This will undoubtedly open new research perspectives entering also into other intersemiotic areas: photography, music (Hania Rani and her album Esja) or visual arts (Magdalena Armanda Kołakowska and Sonia Rammer).

The article aims to show the specificity of travelling in the digital age and the reconfigurations taking place in women’s travel. Because it represents both aspects, the Globstory travel channel, created on YouTube at the initiative of vlogger Kaja Kraska, was chosen as the subject of consideration. The methodology of the study is to analyse the content of this vlog and its paratexts: its social media accounts and related press materials. The article also contains numerous references to the sociology of travel and media studies.
The article, preceded by an introduction and an overview of travel vlogs in Poland, covers three issues. The first is the characterisation of the image of the creator of Globstory, who, pursuing the ideas of backpacking and free travel, establishes the authenticity of her accounts and distances herself from mass tourism. Next, the vlogger’s interaction with her subscribers, taking place at the level of the vlog’s content and external communication in online social networks, is discussed. The idea of the culture of participation, prevalent in the era of new media, is treated as the context for this part of the study. The last of the issues addressed are the references to the poetics of reporting visible in Kraska’s vlog, which result from a problem-based and transmedial approach to the material she produces.
The article ends by considering the replacement of the mainstream image of a media celebrity traveller with that of an independent globetrotter followed on the Internet. The Globstory channel is also seen as a project complementary to the transformations of contemporary reporting, influenced by its convergence with new media.

Texts classified as travel literature remain underused material in the teaching of world literature, as well as within Polish studies. This article attempts to rectify this by formulating an original teaching proposal. It is intended to help construct curricula for future courses on world literature in Polish studies. In terms of genre, the proposal is based on the use of a wide range of foreign travel writing originating in different cultural environments and historical periods, and representing various literary genres. With reference to teaching methods, this proposal is based on the simultaneous and coordinated use of two modern teaching techniques: presenting students with tasks requiring creative thinking and with open-ended problems intended to provoke intellectual effort. Student activity, supervised by the teacher, thus becomes one of the main objectives of the class. The form of teaching that is most conducive to the realisation of this teaching proposal is a conversation-based class and lecture. Both facilitate effective, multi-vectorial intellectual interaction and team work.

The motivation for discussing representations of the Soviet Union in Polish reporting has been the desire to examine how the greatest Polish reporters grappled with such an important political and social problem. For writers and historians, Soviet communism posed a difficult challenge, which raised many questions: how to avoid stereotyping, shoulder the burden of the past, and navigate the constraints of censorship of the communist period. How not to join the naïve voices of some Western intellectuals enchanted by Soviet propaganda (a problem faced by Wańkowicz and Pruszyński)? The article presents the use of individual reporting techniques and artistic devices visible in the observations and the reflections formulated by Polish reporters.
The research material has been arranged chronologically. Written with artistry, Wańkowicz’s reports from the 1930s record his fascination with the newly emerging workers’ state, but they also document many disturbing phenomena, contrasts and lies. His particularly critical observations had to be later removed or mitigated by the writer in the post-war editions. These interesting self-censoring changes are examined in detail in this article. Pruszyński’s texts are a valuable supplement to the complicated relations between, on the one hand, Sikorski’s government and the main Allies, and on the other hand, Stalin’s state. They also present the creation of the Polish army in the USSR. At the same time, they are an artful and expressive picture of a brave nation led by a charismatic dictator (the texts were written before the discovery of the Katyń massacre!). Although dependent on her party bosses, Hanna Krall, a reporter from a satellite state, managed to construct an authentic representation of the life of individuals in the Soviet state. She achieved this thanks to her style of ‘mundane realism’ and the use of microanalysis as a technique. However, she did not manage to avoid the optimism that was obligatory at the time with regard to the entire system (especially the reforms initiated by Khrushchev and Brezhnev). Ryszard Kapuściński took up Soviet themes in numerous works over many years; his reports from ‘exotic’ Asian republics and his depiction of the cultural melting pot of the former USSR are particularly interesting. He was also given the opportunity to describe perestroika and the final collapse of the red empire; he reported also on how the foundations of the new Russia were built.

The article is based on the following claim: the greatest reporters, who employed a variety of writing techniques, encountered serious – objective and subjective – difficulties in representing the dynamic spectrum of transformations and perspectives which communism brought about for the USSR itself and also for Poland. The effects of their reporting work are thus varied, and the imprint of the times is visible in them.
The text is situated within the disciplines of social communication and media studies, literary studies and modern history. The methodologies used in the article include text analysis and interpretation, stylistic, genre and comparative analysis, thematic and historical research.

The article analyses Wojciech Karpiński’s latest book titled 120 dni „Kultury” in the context of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of man. Karpiński chose texts published in “Kultura”, a Parisian literary magazine, from writers who inspired him the most, taught him how to look at the world and at other people, and above all showed him how to discover the beauty of art. Karpiński’s ‘I’ was shaped by his encounter with other artists. Narrative identity is a bridge leading to the concept of open dialectics proposed by the French philosopher, which combines two methods. One involves the researcher adopting an a posteriori approach, starting from the concrete, i.e. the individual subject located in specific realities of life, immersed in a specific culture, having their own history and experiences. For the other, the researcher uses a Kantian turn, reflecting on the subject in a transcendental perspective. Subjectivity means turning towards the Other, and thanks to the Other, one transcends oneself. As Ricoeur argues, there is an “ontological force” in language that points to a certain way of being-inthe-world. Identity is consciously transformed, and literature is simultaneously an artistic record of this movement and a cultural-anthropological discourse.

The text presents major and the most interesting Polish prose and poetry books published in 2020 in order to review the state of the Polish publishing industry last year and to attempt to answer the question whether the coronavirus pandemic has somehow affected writers, poets, and publishers. The article also asks what type of fiction was most likely to be published and which writers and poets were most popular with reviewers. It briefly analyses and interprets ten prose and poetry books, showing also how other commentators of contemporary literary life have written about them. The selection of books to be discussed is therefore based not so much on the author’s subjective feelings as on reception. The aim of the text is also to underline the diversity of these publications and to show the most popular creative trends. The authors discussed include: Joanna Bator, Konrad Góra, Wioletta Grzegorzewska, Hanna Krall, Natalia Malek, Krystyna Miłobędzka, Marta Podgórnik, Zyta Rudzka, Szczepan Twardoch, and Patrycja Sikora. In most cases, these are authors who are well known to the Polish reading public and who either announced their new books or offered selections of their previous work. The compilation proves that readers (including “professional” ones) especially appreciated those works in which the authors attempted to consolidate shattered identities, returned to a traumatic past in an attempt to order the “here and now”, or discussed communication problems, as well as those stories that could be described as socially engaged. The text is located within the disciplines of literary studies and literary criticism.