Zagadnienia recepcji dzieła i pisarza

Abstract

Reception is a very complex phenomenon. Its study may concern one work or all the works of an author, himself as a man and writer, the literary activities of a group of writers representing a trend or school, or even contacts and connexions between two national literatures. In eaoh case both literary and extra-literary factors must be studied, because reception is socially and historically conditioned both at the author's and at the reader's end. So the student of reception must understand literary, social, and historical faotors involved in it. Numerous examples taken from the Medieval, the Renaissance and the Romantic periods, in England and Poland support these and subsequent statements. Studying the reception of W. Scott in his own oountry and elsewhere one finds a very rioh material illustrating: 1) the influence of the publishers on the contents and the shape of the book the writer wished to write, but was not allowed; 2) the reception by the common reader, oritics, and scholars measured by circulation and shaped by various causes; 3) imitation, burlesque, adaptation, rivalry and relegation to school of the literary work as forms of reception; k ) the rise of the interest in the person of the author in the form of legends, more or less distorting the truth; 5) the influence of the writer and his work on extra-literary reality (e.g. tourism connected with his birthplace or places which appear in his works); 6) the influence on the literary and cultural tradition of the recipient society; 7) factors working in the choice of works to be translated and misunderstandings ensuing from the temporal oontext in which the choice is made; 8) the selectiveness of re—publications of translated works and the consequent deformation of the image of the author; 9) the problem of similarities between works of authors, who belong to different literatures, based on parallel developments; 10) difficulties of necessary genetic interpretation of the reception. The author ends with a claim that the study of reception serves a better understanding of the received and the recipient literatures and cultures.