English Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries and Print Culture Research Unit

🌍 version in Polish (wersja w języku polskim)

The aim of the research unit is to explore the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature with the aid of interdisciplinary methodologies, with a special emphasis on print culture studies. This innovative and rapidly developing field affords a new perspective on literary development, one that takes into account the role of print technology and socio-economic conditions in the formation of genres and aesthetic categories customarily used in literary studies. The relation between print culture and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature are particularly tight due to the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the modernization of the technology of print in the early nineteenth century, particularly the invention of steam-powered printing press that allowed printing on an industrial scale. Members of the research unit are engaged in projects which explore literature in the broad context of print culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They teach courses on the history of literature, literary and cultural theory, history of the book, literary pragma-stylistics, and seminars on more specialist aspects of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture.