Praca składa się z dziewięciu szkiców, z których każdy dotyczy powracającego w dawnej literaturze i piśmiennictwie elementu tematycznego: alegorii, motywu, obrazu, metafory. Łączy je podobna postawa poznawcza, znajdująca swoje uzasadnienia w badaniach antropologicznych, tematologicznych i intertekstualizmie. Monografia reprezentuje rodzaj badań rzadko podejmowanych w europejskiej humanistyce.

This book is an attempt at digging up of man and of people from text, an interpretation of old forms of existence - of constant literary images through which the past was expressed and perhaps through which it looks for our understanding. The author penetrates into the band of textual repetitions (motifs, metaphors, topoi and images) of great symbolic power and vitality, deep literary and thought consolidation and universal features. Questions and motifs appear here in turn: people who were here before us (introduction); part one: man as a creator of text, technologies of production of the woven literary work, farewell by the author to his own text-child, extreme situations of imprisonment and the collective fear and writing; part two: man as a participant in the political-spiritual community, The Republic-Mother and her immortality; part three: global metaphors of the world and man, Other. This book also points to the constancy of human problematics in the old systems of literary representation, which copiously used imagination and symbolic ideology, formation of concrete ways of literary expression, conditions of hermeneutic availability of people from the past epochs. The permanent "shining through" of man from old texts allows to speak about him as a true, pivotal, "commonplace" of old literature - where he is a choice, a trace, a reminiscence - and also allows to make studies in the field of literary anthropology a possible and specialized field of research.