Search

In the late nineteenth century British culture, politics and history were customary topics in Polish newspapers, and Shakespeare's dramas were the most often performed classic texts on the Warsaw theatre stage. However, in this paper focusing on Warsaw seasons 1814/1815–1900/1901 I demonstrate that surprisingly one can hardly talk about any form of cultural transfer between the British and Polish popular theatre and drama in that period. The analysis of the Warsaw repertoire, travel recollections to the United Kingdom and press articles, reveal that even though the Polish nation treated the UK as a point of reference, it consistently rejected the British theatre at large and theatre entertainment in particular, and considered it 'crude' and in bad taste. I claim that the geopolitical situation of Poland cannot alone account for this puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As soon as the corpse became central to medical education, and as a growing number of private medical schools opened throughout Great Britain, involving the rise of the demand for dead bodies, the literary field played a significant part in the popularisation of medical knowledge, offering insights into the debates around medical practice and education. As this paper will show, the literary field dealt with medical practitioners' treatment of the corpse through playing upon a Gothic rhetoric, dramatizing the tension between the cutting up, preservation and exhibition of human remains in medical collections and the objectification of the patient on the one hand, and the central part played by anatomy in medical knowledge and the therapeutic applications of dissection, on the other. Through exploring how literary texts capitalizing on the Gothic paraphernalia recorded cultural responses to medical practice in the long nineteenth century, this paper will ultimately underline the role that nineteenth-century literature played, not merely in the dissemination of medical knowledge but also in the public engagement of medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]