Two Economies: Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

The article presents the vision of economy as husbandry inscribed in Adam Mickiewicz’s narrative poem Pan Tadeusz. This vision opposes the modern liberal economy, which shaped capitalism in the first half of the 19th century. The issue is discussed in the context of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, as well as Mickiewicz’s own economic views, as presented in his journalistic writing and his Paris lectures. Both literary texts depict landed estates at the beginning of the 19th century: in a historically Polish territory and in England. In the latter case, we are dealing with an outline of the perspective of transitioning from traditional economy to the modern bourgeois model (connected with the colonial expansion); in the former – with an attempt to transpose traditional economy to the level of myth and with eschewing development towards capitalism.