Od legendy do faktu — od faktu do legendy. Wczesne romanse podróżnicze H. Ridera Haggarda

The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the time of great geographical explorations and discoveries which also constituted a source of inspiration for the fin-de-siecle writers. Between 1880 and 1920 there emerged a variant of adventure fiction, usually defined as the “quest romance” or “imperial romance”. The article discusses three such texts by H. Rider Haggard: King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Allan Quatermain (1887) and She (1887). It concentrates mainly on the interrelation between fact and legend (the process of one turning into the other) and on the function of the peritext — the title page, the introduction, the footnotes or the quoted texts from the fictional reality — in establishing that relation as well as blurring the barrier between the fictitious world and the world of the actual readers.