The selected period of Polish literature is undoubtedly focal in the development of modern nationalism in Poland, as it contains the years of struggle for survival under foreign rule. Romantic poetry and its idea of national messianism is at the core of this study (Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasinski). It considers the role played by the notion of great, pre-partitioned Poland (it had included Lithuania, Belorus and Ukraine) in the development of the idea of 'Polishness' in the course of the nineteenth century. The role of history, religion, national uprisings and old `Samaritan' culture form other points of interest.

Preface Introduction: The Character of Polish Nationalism: It's Literary Foundations Before 1795 The Formation of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism in Polish Literature Messianism and the National Cause The Poetry of Suffering and Rebellion The Domestic Utopia of Rural Paradise Populistic Nationalism in Fiction and Henryk Sienkiewicz Anti-Insurrectionism: The Ideas of Universality, Labour and Political Realism Apologists and Revisionists From the Assault on National Myths to the Cult of Proletariat Afterword Index

STANISLAW EILE is Senior Lecturer in Polish at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and Professor of Polish Literature at the Polish University in London. His research covers modern Polish literature, particularly fiction, problems of nationalism in literature and the theory of the novel. His books include, Modernist Trends in Twentieth-Century Polish Fiction (1996), and he co-authored New Perspectives in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature (1992).