Praca sytuuje się na skrzyżowaniu kilku dziedzin: romanistyki, polonistyki, komparatystyki oraz poetyki historycznej. Autora interesuje proces narodzin nowoczesności literackiej pod koniec XIX wieku w opozycji zarówno do romantyzmu i poezji o charakterze ekspresywnym, jak i do parnasizmu francuskiego. Osią badań jest "retoryka milczenia" obecna u obu poetów. Autor bada pisarstwo milczenia jako wyraz nowej koncepcji poezji, w której sens nie poprzedza wyrazu, ale rodzi się dzięki pracy nad słowem.

The subject of this book is of key importance for the studies devoted to the evolution of the poetry of the end of the 19th century. It allows to understand better the break with the tradition still present in the 19th century (the Romantic poetry and Parnassisrn), which combined poetry with the order of representation and discourse. Thus, what is meant here is to show changes of the poetic language (rhythm, sound and verbal matter become more important than the meaning in the traditional sense of the word) and a relationship of these aesthetic transformations with the crisis of values. The book places Mallarme and Norwid in the literary context of the epoch which allows to better explain the poetic search the aim of which is to create a new language of poetry as well as a new type of reading. Silence is not a synonym of the end of poetry here, but is connected rather with its new conception in which of importance appears to be the materiality of words and their internal relations, and not their relations with a designate or dependence on the composition of discourse.