Staropolskie pieśni nowiniarskie
Old Polish News Stories

Summary/Abstract: The first part of the paper consists of a critical review of the attempts to describe the verse news story to date and its basic genre markers. The considerations presented here lead to the conclusion that the Old Polish news story was a syncretic phenomenon of indistinct borders and encompassed various conventions developed on the grounds of other poetic genres. On the other hand, we observe a peculiar expansion of verse news stories having a great influence on the development of some types of Old Polish occasional poetry, which gave way to the emergence of certain intermediate forms such as panegyric news stories, pasquil news stories, aubade news stories, lament news stories. The second part of the paper brings a typology of news stories based on the criteria of the text composition and the narrative intention. A detailed analysis reveals three basic types of the verse news stories: a) chronicle, in which the informative intention dominates, and where the text is almost entirely filled with narration presenting the events in chronological order and in a relatively detailed way; b) lamentatory-religious, in the foreground having the moralistic intention, and strengthening the receiver in the conviction of religious perception and interpretation of events as a punishment or a reward sent by God; the text’s composition is founded on its peculiar fragmentary character and on interspersing the elements of the narration with lamentatory complaints and elaborated propitiatory-devout apostrophes; c) political-propagandist, where the main intention of the narrator is convincing the listener about a specific political conception, and the narration itself is not infrequently of vestigial character and is superseded by numerous commentaries with a marked panegyric, polemic, or satirical element.

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