Rozmowa człowieka ze Śmiercią – motyw, temat, topos?
A conversation of man with Death – a motif, topic, topos?

Summary/Abstract: A conversation with Death has constituted a fixed element of various literary works for ages, starting from rhymed or prose-written medieval arguments, morality plays, epicedia, and funeral speeches to comedies. The aim of this work is to establish how to define this recurrence, namely can one ascribe a conversation with Death to the motif, topic or topos? What definitions of these terms should be taken into account? According to the author, a conversation with Death should be treated as a literary topic, being a particular manifestation of a general death motif that was realized within various literary genres or up-dated in relation to ideological assumptions of a given epoch.

• Details
• Contents