The team involved in executing the “New Perspectives on Poetics” project, financed by the Polish National Program for the Development of the Humanities, invites submissions to the sixth issue of the bilingual (Polish and English) online journal Forum of Poetics.
This issue, entitled “Poetics of the Past,” proposes entering into a discussion of present-day perspectives on historical poetics. We are particularly drawn to two areas of reflection. The first consists of ancient, medieval, and early modern instances of formulated poetics, which provoke such questions as: how do we read the poetological works of Aristotle, Scaliger, Boileau, and others today? What stands out in them? How is their normativity discussed, and how do we describe the relationship between the principles of literary art contained therein and the works that attempted to implement those? Are there new ways of interpreting the tradition of writing formulated poetics, including its more recent, twentieth century iterations?
A second set of problems we would like to discuss relates to the immanent poetics of particular works of the literary past. What areas of scholarship concerning such past poetics inscribed in literary works are being developed today? What uses do immanent poetics of works from bygone ages have to offer scholars after the transformation of the field by such projects as cultural poetics, and how do they glean such concepts from these works?
We are also prompted to raise these questions by an interest in what elements of poetics are currently thought to be in particularly active use in reading works of the past. In what way do contemporary scholars find support in concepts of poetics for describing the influence of old masterpieces and non-canonical works? Is it their rhythm, style, form, broadly understood, or aspects that fall under the purview of micropoetics?


Articles, once accepted, will be translated into English by qualified translators and published simultaneously in both languages. Please send submissions by 30 September 2016 to one of the following e-mail addresses: forumpoetyki@gmail.com; forumofpoetics@gmail.com.