Vol. 30 (2024)

In the memoir opening the 30th volume of Popular Literature and Culture, we bid farewell to Dr Jacek Ladorucki, a distinguished bibliologist from Łódź. The articles that follow are divided into four main parts. In the first of these, various texts of popular culture are examined from non-obvious perspectives, for example the Slovakian contexts in Bram Stoker's Dracula or the semanticisation of the animal world in The Four Armoured and the Dog. The second part focuses on fantasy literature, especially the practices of constructing (directly or indirectly) fictional worlds – for example intertextual references in Polish translations of Tolkien's works or the use of naturalistic poetics in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. The third group of texts describes various ways of engaging in a dialogue between popular culture and reality, such as the second life of Stanislaw Wokulski in internet memes and the non-obvious status of film genres in Slovak cinema. In the fourth section, the authors look at crime literature, including Agatha Christie's perverse play with the rules of the ‘good detective story’ and Gaia Grzegorzewska's no less perverse play with the noir convention. The volume closes with a review article on Agnieszka Trześniewska-Nowak's monograph on the medical thriller.