Hybridity of Juliusz Słowacki’s Voyage to the Holy Land from Naples from Eastern Notebook in an Intermedial and Transmedial Perspective

Abstract

The essay discusses Voyage to the Holy Land from Naples by Juliusz Słowacki, treated as part of the recently rediscovered Eastern Notebook, with a focus on the relations between the text and its visual aspects within the poem and in reference to the pictures and sketches from the notebook. Apart from the genre hybridity of Voyage…, the essay emphasises its media hybridity on different levels: from the intermedial perspective (the poem in relation to the drawings associated with it, such as the drawing of Agamemnon’s tomb or the sketch of the Vostiza tree which appears at the end of canto VI) and from the transmedial perspective (the transfer of structures from different media to the poem, such as paintings, postcards, paper-cuts, graffi ti/hieroglyphs, magic lantern – with special attention paid to the overlapping of Salvator Rosa’s paintings and phantasmagoric magic lantern shows). The essay thus highlights Słowacki’s sensitivity to visual phenomena of different technological origins and how his poetry refl ects such phenomena.