Allegory and passions. Page in the history of literary criticism in the 19th century

Abstract

The starting point for the present essay is the controversy that arose in the 1840s between Edward Dembowski and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. It pertained to the poetics of George Sand’s Les sept cordes de la Lyre, published in 1839 in the Parisian Revue des Deux Mondes magazine. The argument between the two Polish critics can be summarised in one question, frequently formulated straightforwardly in the contemporary critical writing of the epoch: what is the point of using allegory in the 19th century? What is more, in his article, Dembowski juxtaposed allegory and “fantasy”, essentially associated with the matter of subjectivity of a literary text, which topic was undertaken by Kraszewski. This essay aims to re-construct the Polish and French contexts, allowing us to understand both ends of the spectrum we use to evaluate the allegories in a literary work. The question about the point of using allegory by 19th-century writers is asked anew to extract from the modern historical-literary perspective themes important for understanding the 19th-century literary worldview, in which the tension between the conventionality and emotionality of the literary communication act is revealed