The book presents the phenomenon of the garden and its various cultural features. It compares historical aspects of the garden with its contemporary models and focuses on various cultural traditions and different ways of presentation of this problem, in the context of world literature, problems of visual arts, questions of architecture, ecology, universal aspects of language, as well as philosophical problems of axiology and aesthetics. All those contexts combine to form a picture of a phenomenon that could be called the metaphor of the garden, containing a universal anthropological image of space in which dynamic re-evaluation of rhetorical models take place and the order of Nature complements cultural models of human understanding of reality.
About the Author: Grzegorz Gazda - historian of literature and comparatist. Professor at the University of Lodz, Director of the Institute of Theory of Literature, Theatre and Audiovisual Arts, specializing in the problems of contemporary Polish and foreign literature. His numerous publications include books on the literary avant-garde of the 20th century: Futuryzm w Polsce [Futurism in Poland, 1974], Awangarda - nowoczesnosc i tradycja. W kregu europejskich kierunkow literackich pierwszych dziesiecioleci XX w. [The Avant-garde - Modernity and Tradition. In the Circle of European Literary Tendencies of the First Decades of the 20th Century,1987) and Slownik europejskich kierunkow i grup literackich XX wieku [Dictionary of European Tendencies and Literary Groups of the 20th Century, 2006). Co-editor of a series of studies, published under the common title W kregu zagadnien awangardy [Around the Problems of the Avant-garde, 1986 - 1995) and such books as Wokol gotycyzmow: wyobraznia, groza, okrucienstwo [Around Gothicisms: Imagination, Horror, Cruelty, 2003], Stereotypy w literaturze (i tuz obok) [Stereotypes in literature (and nearby), 2003], Slownik rodzajow i gatunkow literackich [Dictionary of Literary Kinds and Genres, 2006), Realizm magiczny. Teoria i realizacje artystyczne [Magic Realism. Theory and Its Artistic Realizations, 2007]. Editor-in-chief of the internationally acclaimed magazine Zagadnienia Rodzajow Literackich [Problems of Literary Kinds]. Mariusz Golab - a Ph.D. and lecturer at the Institute of Theory of Literature, Theatre and Audiovisual Arts of the University of Lodz. Theoretician and historian of literature. His works concern mainly problems of contemporary literature in the theoretical context of cognitive studies and literary anthropology. He specializes in the problems of cultural universals, conceived as relations between language and other forms of expression, traditional poetics and new tendencies in literary theory and aesthetics. His book Jezyk i rzeczywistosc w tworczosci Mirona Bialoszewskiego [Language and Reality in the Literature of Miron Bialoszewski], concerning various aspects of Bialoszewski's linguistic poetics seen from the cognitive point of view, was published in 2001.