Dlaczego preromantyzm? Literatura przełomu XVIII i XIX stulecia w terminologii historyka literatury

The article is an attempt to look at the meaning of the term “pre-Romanticism” through the prism of its functioning in literary texts. The subject of analysis are texts published in two book by Alina Aleksandrowicz and Ewa Grzęda. The two books are different in terms of the date (1991 and 2007) and the nature of the publication (collective volume and author’s anthology of literary works), but also linked to each other through the use of the term pre-Romanticism in their titles. The reconstructed senses of the term pre-Romanticism refer to aesthetic and literary phenomena which have their specific names in literary studies: Sentimentalism, Gothicism, Ossianism or Rococo. The observations of other literary researchers (T. Kostkiewiczowa, A. Kowalczykowa, J. Krzyżanowski, Z. Libera, J. Lyszczyna, J. Maciejewski), who previously considered the problem of pre-Romanticism, constitute a complementary or comparative material for the formulated conclusions.