TY - JOUR N2 - In the last phase of Franciszek Karpiński's life as a writer (the first quarter of the 19th century), he practically gave up poetry and concentrated instead on writing memoirs. This article tries to find out to what extent his autobiographical work, especially his Historia mego wieku i ludzi, z którymi żyłem [A History of My Century and the People with Whom I Lived], is influenced by an attitude characteristic of the sentimentalism of the previous century. As this analysis shows Karpiński's narrative exhibits both a sensitivity much indebted to Rousseau's autobiographical method and skilful shifts of tone, from satire and irony to various shades of melancholy. For sentimentalist aesthetic and poetics the continual manipulation of tone is a means of alerting the reader to the world's complexity. As in the novels of Lawrence Sterne, that complexity is experienced by way of careful observation of fragments of reality, defined by the subjectivity of the observer and the truth of his emotions. L1 - http://www.journals.pan.pl/Content/114770/PDF/2019-05-LITR-03-Zajac.pdf L2 - http://www.journals.pan.pl/Content/114770 PY - 2019 IS - No 5 (356) EP - 545 DO - 10.24425/rl.2019.131387 KW - the history of Polish literature KW - the Enlightenment KW - prose KW - memoirs KW - sentimentalism KW - Franciszek Karpiński (1741–1825) A1 - Zając, Grzegorz PB - Polska Akademia Nauk Oddział w Krakowie Komisja Historycznoliteracka PB - Uniwersytet Jagielloński Wydział Polonistyki DA - 2020.07.23 T1 - Franciszek Karpiński – A hallmark sentimental writer? SP - 533 UR - http://www.journals.pan.pl/dlibra/publication/edition/114770 T2 - Ruch Literacki ER -