Przegląd Humanistyczny 2023/2 (481)

The issue is devoted to the relationship between the transformations of religiosity and broadly understood emancipation processes as captured in Polish writing of the second half of the 19th century. The individual articles show how various forms of spirituality (those institutional and private) influenced the description of underprivileged groups within modern society. The authors of the studies argue that religiosity significantly influenced nineteenth-century narratives of liberation and oppression, development and subjugation, and that it conditioned the unique dynamics of Polish modernisation – sometimes as an inhibiting factor, at other times as a driving one. The contributors to the volume thus challenge and complicate the secularisation thesis, which proclaims that with scientific and technological progress a 'disenchantment of the world' took place in the 19th century.

The issue includes articles that are the aftermath of the national academic conference "Modernized souls. Religiousness and emancipation in Polish writing (1869-1914)”, organised by the Department of Literature and Culture of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century of the University of Warsaw on 7-8 March 2022.