Co-author of the anthology „The devils have taken the lord” Julian Przyboś and the folk turn of the humanities

Abstract

„There and then” (i.e., Poland of the first half of the 1950s), the matter indicated by the words “poetry fighting for progress and social liberation 1543-1953” remained intertwined with the literary studies of the time, while „here and now” (Poland of the third decade of the 21st century) this matter may be c r i t ic a l l y r e f e r r e d to as the folk turn, also called peasant or plebeian. Does the opposition of „old” and „new literary studies”, characteristic of the first half of the 1950s, lead its life after life in the folk turn? Any decisive answer, i.e. a binary choice, would probably be wrong, for it comes down to balancing contradictory arguments and counter-arguments. The anthology „Wzięli diabli pana” does not point out two factors of past rural oppression that are important nowadays, namely the parson’s propination coercion and marital rape of peasant women by peasant men.