Jagiellonian University Press – förlag

New Perspectives in English and American Studies. Volume One: Literature contains a selection of papers delivered at 14th International Conference on English and American Literature and Language, an international event organized every three years by the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. The editors divided the content into five broad sections reflecting the scope of academic reflection, the breadth of cultural material and the depth of its analysis.The articles in the volume revolve around the topics of literary and cultural studies and their diversity mirrors the broad spectrum of the thematic panels of the conference.These included, among others, Medievalism in Literature, James Joyce Studies, The Contemporary Historical Novel and Multimodality. Aside from these thematic sessions, a number of general sessions dedicated to a wide spectrum of topics pertinent to English and American studies was held – in particular, the issues of the individual’s perspective upon collective history, regional myths as well as the pivotal new historical awareness.

What happens in the wake of the event? Is the event’s aftermath always characterised by the experience of disorder, fragmentation, and impermanence? Or, alternatively, can aftermath be seen as a new growth, a second crop of grass that can be sown and reaped and which gives rise to a new integrity, a new unity? The volume’s twenty-three essays by scholars from Australia, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, and the United States re-visit the notion and representation of aftermath, understood here widely as a consequence/result/after-effect of a seminal event (to an individual, a community, society, regions or nations), and explore its transformative and life-changing characteristics. While acknowledging disastrous or catastrophic consequences of the event, Aftermath argues in favour of recognising some rejuvenating potential of its after-effects.Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English is a bilingual, English-Polish book series dedicated to publishing original research on 20th and 21st century literature in English. Monographs and collective volumes in the series address, but are not restricted to, the following research areas: literary genre studies, comparative literature, cultural poetics and transversality of ideas, as well as transnationalism of literature in English.

The following publication constitutes a continuation of a longstanding research conducted by both authors on nourishment, dietetics, pharmacology and gastronomy in the Late Antiquity and early Byzantium. The book was created based primarily on Greek medical treaties composed from the 1st to 7th century, but it takes into account data that originates outside of this collection. The goal of the authors was to present the knowledge of the people in antiquity and Byzantium on eggs and dairy products. To achieve that they attempted to translate into contemporary language the way of thinking of then doctors, and to present main points of the theory propagated by them. In particular, the authors have shown ways of utilizing aforementioned alimentary products as food and medicine. Thus, they consciously encroach the area of history of pharmacology and gastronomy. Even though the nature of their research led the authors to focus on conclusions in the field of the history of food and medicine, they also take up the issues related to society and economy of this period.

During the whole of his writing career August Strindberg was a restless canon-maker. In his capacity as writer, librarian, cultural scholar, polemicist and amateur researcher he constantly quoted sources, both historical and contemporary, included and excluded certain authors in his own work, as well as re-evaluated the boundaries of aesthetics and culture around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, he was a very active author in his own right, living in self-imposed exile but in close contact with cosmopolitan intellectual circles. All of this raises questions about his relationship with the literary and cultural canon. The dynamics between local and global culture define the whole of his oeuvre and make him one of those European authors who are readily interpreted in the context of Weltliteratur.Strindberg was a multilingual cosmopolitan, an emigrant, theosophist, and reporter. In his capacity as a writer, with his gaze trained upon both East and West, he absorbed impressions from the universalist tendencies of the fin de siècle. His ambition to join the global “Republic of Letters” led him to study French, Hebrew, the Chinese system of logograms, Russian literature, and the history of the Middle East.This volume, edited by Jan Balbierz, gathers contributions from renowned Strindberg scholars and discusses questions, such as: How did Strindberg construct his predecessors and which traditions did he associate himself with? How is a Strindbergian text altered in performative practice in theatre and film? How did Strindberg, whose writings are deeply rooted in Swedish folklore and landscape, relate to foreign cultural values?

The monograph concerns the origin of the Latin -iēs/-ia inflection, the topic which to this day has not been explained satisfactorily. The proposal presented in the book allows for the most economic solution to the problem without difficult assumptions which were present in the previous hypotheses. The author explains the origin of the formation as the result of the identification and mutual influence of three former paradigms reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European and subsequent analogical influence of the commonly used Latin noun diēs ''day'' from the fifth declension.Apart from the hypothesis itself, the analysis of all the forms of the Latin -iēs/-ia inflection is presented with an etymological commentary and illustrative examples from the original ancient texts. The question on the origin of the Latin fifth declension is also mentioned alongside the modern description of the Proto-Indo-European derivational morphology.

Take a look at the political map of the world and you will see that almost every piece of land belongs to a state. This division – in contrast, for example, to the split created by a valley between two mountains – is man-made, imaginary, and arbitrary, and therefore can be easily questioned. Indeed, in addition to the multiple disputed borders that permeate the world map, some countries are not recognized or partially recognized. Other states decide whether a certain political unit can be recognized as sovereign. Again, even though their decision concerns imaginary divisions created by borders, accepting or rejecting them has far-reaching consequences in real life. The unrecognized country stays outside of a club of sovereign states, which makes cooperation with its members very difficult or even impossible. It has no choice but to invent novel ways to conduct external relations. Moreover, this specific international situation has a major impact on its politics, people’s lifestyles, culture, etc.This book is about just such an exceptional entity in the international community of states – Taiwan. It explains how the island’s specific international situation influences the developments in its external and internal affairs.Taiwan’s Exceptionalism shines the spotlight on two areas that are heavily influenced by Taipei’s unique status – its external and internal affairs. Additionally, each chapter of the book addresses the active role of Taiwanese society in shaping their international fate. First, it introduces the reader to Taiwan’s international legal status; next, it turns to the consequences of the island’s specific situation for international relations in the South China Sea, as well as in the US-China-Taiwan triangle. Having set the historical and political background for the following chapters, the volume draws attention to important phenomena in Taiwan’s internal affairs that are closely related to the status of the island. They examine Taiwan’s democratic development and challenges, civil society activism, indigenous tourism clusters, eco-tourism and the image of the island in Polish dailies. The authors believe that all of these facets are exceptional in the sense that they all bear the imprint of the island’s distinct international situation.

Crisis defines the present cultural moment. From the environment, through migration, to democracy, a continuous state of emergency engulfs us – so much so that crisis appears to be one of the few things not in crisis. The Post-Crash Decade of American Cinema: Wall Street, the "Mancession" and the Political Construction of Crisis focuses on two instances of this overwhelming trend: the latest masculinity crisis and what helped trigger it – the 2008 global financial crash. Looking at selected American cinematic texts of culture from the subsequent ten years, depicting both the causes of the crash and its victims, the volume offers answers to the questions: how has (popular) culture, in particular literature and film, responded to the greatest economic upheaval since the Great Depression, and what conclusions can be drawn from this response?Timely, interdisciplinary and in-depth, this analysis combines literary and cultural studies, as well as feminist criticism, gender studies and masculinities studies with research on the latest history of political economy to interrelate such diverse phenomena as capitalism, "Wall Street culture", the "Mancession" myth, Donald Trump, pornography, patriarchy, neoliberalism, precarity, postfeminism, the fourth wave of feminism, the #MeToo movement, 9/11, home, housing studies, positive psychology, and happiness studies. Ultimately, the book problematises the very concept of "crisis", elucidating it as a powerful political construct.Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English> is a bilingual, English-Polish book series dedicated to publishing original research on 20th and 21st century literature in English. Monographs and collective volumes in the series address, but are not restricted to, the following research areas: literary genre studies, comparative literature, cultural poetics and transversality of ideas, as well as transnationalism of literature in English.

The idea for this book came about as a result of the ICT Guides project, which was funded by the Erasmus+ programme . The project was carried out in 2015-2018 in Gothenburg (Sweden), Berlin (Germany), Madrid (Spain) and Sheffield (United Kingdom). The cities identified for the project all have a relatively high percentage of young school students with immigrant backgrounds. This group of Europeans in particular are at risk of early school leaving, and are over-represented in terms of unemployment. The book addresses the issue of information and communication technology (ICT) use in an educational environment, and presents research results from the ICT Guides project. In order to discuss how ICT can be used as a means to prevent early school leaving among immigrant youth, this book explores the literature on how learning can be understood in the intergenerational context (Chapter 1); what the challenges are in preventing early school leaving (Chapter 2), and the prospects for ICT in education (Chapter 3). Finally, we present the findings of an empirical study on intergenerational learning with the use of information and communications technology (Chapter 4). As reports on youth in Europe show, young immigrants are most at risk of social exclusion. Employment is a strong protective factor against the risk of poverty, and – as identified in the EU 2020 strategy – one of the most important targets for a smart, sustainable and inclusive Europe. Immigrant youths suffer from having an incomplete education, partly because of the economic crisis in Europe, and partly because of the military conflicts and strife in places such as Syria and Afghanistan. Our findings highlight the fact that ICT-supported learning is a significant sociocultural platform for knowledge exchange, at the same time reducing intergenerational and cultural distance. It helps work toward the common good, creates a sense of belonging and ensures mutual support, and encourages better understanding and harmonious coexistence between young immigrants and older citizens. The function of ICT in intergenerational learning is changing, from serving as its catalyst to facilitating its participants’ learning about each other.

The world is standing on the very edge of the fastest industrial revolution ever. A revolution which will rapidly increase the efficiency of many production processes. Automation (both mechanical and the one happening with computer processes) will reduce the demand for human work and release a huge amount of time we can use for further development. Industry 4.0 has been a buzz word recently. It is about interconnecting devices and giving them the possibility to making autonomous decisions. It is certainly a way of increasing efficiency of production, but it will also have impact on the facilitation of other processes within the organization.At the same time, it is said that we are on the verge of an ecological catastrophe and that we have merely a few years before irreversible climate changes may endanger the future of our species. Some say, that the development of AI will solve most of our problems. We believe that the need for the activity of human beings will be even bigger.

The Monograph stands out positively from the items related to change management in the context of entrepreneurial opportunities and flexibility of the organization. The authors attempt to integrate retrospective and prognostic approaches, so they not only assess the current status, but also point to challenges for management science. The work has been prepared by people whose authority in management sciences is undisputed. With this book we try to provide the reader with information about miscellaneous parts of life and the social-economical environment. For this purpose, we have invited authors representing the leading scientific research centers in Poland but also specialists from foreign universities.

The Festschrift is a collection of papers written in honour of Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld to mark the occasion of her 70th birthday.Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld is one of the leading authorities in the field of language contact, and has pursued research on the influence of English on Polish and other European languages, Polish-English contrastive studies, as well as various aspects of English grammar. She has authored more than 160 publications, including four books, as well as course books and academic papers. She has also edited and co-edited dictionaries of English borrowings in Polish. The Festschrift volume comprises papers from the world of linguistics which have been authored by eminent scholars from Poland and abroad. The chapters included in the volume focus on various issues, including those from the area of contact linguistics. The topics covered in the research papers comprise, for instance, the influence of English on different languages, such as Polish, Danish, Afrikaans, Swedish, Spanish, German and Japanese, as well as on Asian languages and cultures. The authors investigate Celtic borrowings in Polish, anglicisms in Serbian, or Yiddish borrowings in contemporary American English. The contributions also discuss the phenomenon of Ponglish, i.e., the communication code used by Poles living in the UK, the presence of foreign languages in the linguistic landscape of Kraków, as well as the problem of multilingualism in Europe, the relation between language, culture and identity, and the influence of globalisation on both Polish language and culture. Finally, selected chapters address a range of phenomena related to Karaim, Russenorsk, and Turkish.

Romantic writers often asserted their individuality, but this assertion tended to take the form of positioning themselves in relation to other authors and literary texts. Thus they implicitly acknowledged the rich network of broadly understood poetic dialogue as an important and potent source for their own creativity. When in 1816 John Keats wrote “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” he celebrated the originality of his contemporaries and the historical significance of his times, pointing to deep interest in “the hum of mighty works” in all the fields of human activity, to which “the nations” ought to listen. Keats’s sonnet suggests not only stimulating exchanges between poets, artists and social thinkers in the same language, but also the idea of transnational appreciation and dialogue.The volume takes up this idea and explores the dialogues of Romantic authors within the wide scope of European and American cultures. Essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Bulgaria, Poland, Canada and the United States of America examine Romantic writers’ responses to their contemporaries, explore their dialogues with the culture of the past, and their interactions across the arts and sciences. They also scrutinize the Romantics’ far-reaching influence on later writers and artists, and thus extend the network of artistic exchange to modern times. The volume offers a rich tapestry of interconnections that span across time and space, interlace languages and cultures, and link Romantic writers and artists with their predecessors and successors across Europe and America. The essays in the collection invite the reader to join ongoing dialogues between writers and their audiences, of the past and present.

Resilience is founded primarily on positive psychology and health psychology, but the theoretical construct, which is analysed, is also present in interdisciplinary research perspectives: medicine, pedagogy and sociology. The authors of this monograph pay attention to the aspect of the relationship of the individual with their social context. Hence, being in a relationship, exchanging information with the social environment becomes the constitutive value of a person (…).The monograph contains the observation, appearing indirectly in almost every chapter, that when undertaking any actions aimed at developing human mental resilience, it should be checked whether the undertaken interactions do not interfere with the natural resitance. Therefore, it is assumed that the activity focused on lasting support for the development of the individual should be carried out when there is a relatively high plasticity in shaping the individual. In addition, such activities should be adapted to the capabilities of people being at a certain stage of development and take into account cultural conditions. The factors affecting the increase in mental resilience are recognized in many aspects, and their source can be both the family and the wider social environment (...).The metaphor in which the accumulation of life experiences by a human being is compared to the act of packing luggage before a long and difficult to plan and predict journey is well known. All negative, painful life experiences constitute the overwhelming weight of metaphorical luggage; while positive experiences are meant to make this load lighter, and the travel - safer and more predictable. The presented metaphor indirectly describes the basic motive of the monograph, illustrating how the greatest simplification can characterize the formation of self-esteem and resilience in man, identifying them with the synergistic effect of experience (including primarily the impact of family and social environment) and biologically conditioned features. By experiencing positive relationships, the child develops those social skills that are necessary for safe functioning in a social group, negotiating by them the requirements of the environment and effective implementation of the challenges that the environment and the circumstances of future life will bring.

Faces of Crisis in 20th-and 21st-Century Prose. An Anthology of Criticism offers a unique overview of the motif of crisis tackled by 20th-and 21st-century novelists. In one way or another, crisis has always been an inevitable part of our lives and it is still a central aspect of the contemporary world, in which we are constantly inundated with information about economic, environmental, and health threats.The anthology is divided into three parts pertaining to the main themes of the articles. The first section “Selves in Crisis” is concerned with personal and identity crisis. The second part “Bonds in Crisis” is devoted to interpersonal relationships and family ties. The third section “Worlds in Crisis” deals with threats on a global scale, both in the present and in the future. Focused on the main theme, literary scholars from different European universities tackle the problem of crisis from various perspectives, analysing works by authors such as James Joyce, Vita Sackville-West, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Daphne du Maurier, D.H. Lawrence, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Zoë Wicomb, Rachel Seiffert, Sarah Waters, Diane Setterfield, Boualem Sansal, Philip K. Dick, and Suketu Mehta.The anthology opens with the article “Literature as Crisis” written by Dr Richard Brown from the University of Leeds, UK. Other articles are authored by young scholars representing universities both in Poland and abroad.

Publication entitled The Contemporary Arab World. Literary and Linguistic Issues was designed and written by the members of staff of the Department of Arabic Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. It shows results of the research linked to their scholarly and didactic interests. It is a collection of six papers dealing with selected issues in the field of Arabic language and literature, focused on phenomena and processes taking place in contemporary Arab world.Teaching Arabic as a foreign language faces many methodological challenges connected with the specificity and complexity of the sociolinguistic situation in the Arabic world. They mostly concern the necessity for considering different types (registers) of the language, distinguishing, understanding and using which makes it possible for learners to achieve full communication skills.The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century brought above all a new look at the didactic process, forcing revision of the traditional grammar–translation method in teaching foreign languages. Higher education schools must cope with new problems connected with their functioning on the broad market of formal and informal education, which is determined by the term “success on the job market”. Needs and expectations of learners change. Which direction will development of Arabic Studies take then? How to bring together the mission of higher education institutions and pragmatic needs of the market, or current needs of “consumers” and guidelines of central curricula. Is such compromise possible?

This book addresses the issues of memory (a more suitable word would be Marianne Hirsh’s term of postmemory) of the Holocaust among young Poles, the attitudes towards Jews and the Holocaust in the comparative context of educational developments in other countries. The term “Jews” is, as rightly noted Joanna Tokarska-Bakir (2010) a decontextualized term used here in the meaning of Antoni Sułek (2010) as a collective “symbolic” entity. The focus was on education (transmitting values), attitudinal changes and actions undertaken to preserve (or counteract) the memory of Jews and their culture in contemporary Poland. The study to which the book primarly refers was conducted in 2008 and was a second study on a national representative sample of Polish adolescents after the first one undertaken in 1998. The data may seem remote from the current political situation of stepping back from the tendency to increase education about the Holocaust which dominated after 1989 and especially between 2000 and 2005, nonetheless they present trends and outcomes of specific educational interventions which are universal and may set examples for various geopolitical contexts. The focus of this research was not primarily on the politics of remembrance, which often takes a national approach, although state initiatives are also brought to the attention of the reader, but rather on grassroots action, often initiated by local civil society organizations (NGOs) or individual teachers and/or students. This study has attempted to discover the place that Jews have (or do not have) in the culture of memory in Poland, where there lived the largest Jewish community in pre-war Europe, more than 90% of which was murdered during the Holocaust. The challenge was to show the diversity of phenomena aimed at integrating Jewish history and culture into national culture, including areas of extracurricular education, often against mainstream educational policy, bearing in mind that the Jews currently living in Poland are also, in many cases, active partners in various public initiatives. It is rare to find in-depth empirical research investigating the ensemble of areas of memory construction and the attitudes of youth as an ensemble, including the evaluation of actions (programmes of non-governmental organisations and school projects) in the field of education, particularly with reference to the long-term effects of educational programmes. The assumption prior to this project was that the asking of questions appearing during this research would stimulate further studies. The book is divided into three parts: Memory, Attitudes and Actions. All three parts of the book, although aimed at analysing an ongoing process of reconstructing and deconstructing memory of the Holocaust in post-2000 Poland, including the dynamics of the attitudes of Polish youth toward Jews, the Shoah and memory of the Shoah, are grounded in different theories and were inspired by various concepts. The assumption prior to the study was that this complex process of attitudinal change cannot be interpreted and explained within the framework on one single academic discipline or one theory. Education and the cultural studies definitely played a significant role in exploring initiatives undertaken to research, study and commemorate the Holocaust and the remnants of the rich Jewish culture in Poland, but the sociology, anthropology and psychology also played a part in helping to see this process from various angles.

The presented publication is a type of bibliographic dictionary, compiled by an interdisciplinary team of authors (Byzantynists and Paleoslavists), containing an overview of medieval texts referring to the person of Muhammad, the Arabs, and the circumstances of the birth of Islam, which were known in the Slavia Orthodoxa area (especially in its eastern part, i.e. in Rus’). Therefore, it presents the works written in the Church Slavic language between the 9th and the mid-16th centuries. As the Old Rus’ discourse on Islam was shaped under the overwhelming influence of Byzantine literature, the majority of the presented sources are Byzantine texts from the 6th–14th centuries, translated into the literary language of the Orthodox Slavs. The reader will also find here a discussion on several relics, originally created in other languages of the Christian East (Syriac, Arabic) and the West (Latin), which – through the Greek – were assimilated on the Slavic ground.This book aims to fill a gap in previous studies on inter-religious polemics in the Middle Ages, which has usually focused on Christian-Muslim cultural relations, analyzing Greek and Latin texts or the works written in one of the Middle Eastern languages, almost completely ignoring the Church Slavic heritage. It is worth noting that a number of the texts presented here (as well as Slavic translations of Byzantine sources) have not been published so far. The information on them, provided in this monograph, is therefore the result of research conducted directly on the manuscript material.

The monograph should be seen as an attempt to present changes affecting the category of family farm owners in Poland over the last 70 years, since the end of World War II. These changes brought significant social transformations, including the dismantling of the landowner class (who had large agricultural farms in their possession), moving the state border westward and changing the multiethnic Polish society into one close to ethnic homogeneity.The main goal of this reflection is to recount ways in which family farms coped with various unfavorable forces and factors in order to remain in operation. One could say that the entire study can be viewed as a manifestation of the well-known phrase that served as the title of the James C. Scott book (1990): Domination and the Arts of Resistance. The monograph presented here refers to these analyses stemming from another edition of sociological research, completed within the framework of the MAESTRO project financed by the National Science Center of Poland.The main goal of the project was to depict the functioning of agricultural family farms as the traditional sector of agriculture in Poland in the contemporary context of globalization processes. The farms were examined in terms of the principles of sustainable development as well as flexibility and resilience in reaction to various crises.The monograph is divided into four essential parts. The first part is devoted to the theoretical issues and methodological groundwork for the entire publication. The second part of the book aims to capture the changes that took place from 1994 to 2017, which was an adequate period to encompass the changes and metamorphoses that mostly happened as a result of two things: the regime transformation which began in 1990, and Poland’s accession to the European Union on May 1, 2004. The third part deals with the crucial issues of regional variations, mostly in regard to life strategies and strategies of operating agricultural farms. Finally, there is a fourth part which places the focus on select themes, such as rural lifestyles, food safety and security, farmers’ utilization of new computer and IT resources, and the potential for socio-political mobilization.

The publication Places and Spaces of Crime in Popular Imagination is part of the Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English Series. The text reflects growing interest in popular literary genres not only among the readers, but mainly in literary research. This still rather under-researched area is now representing fertile grounds for various theoretical approaches. As the publication mainly declares its interest in crime-related genres, its focus on place is justifiable: it reflects the postmodern “spatial turn”, manifested in an increased emphasis on the location of crime, not necessarily in the sense of the crime scene itself, but as a socio-geographical place and space. The setting of crime has a specific and well-defined role in the traditional crime genres, but this role has been redefined in the modern versions of crime-related fiction. ranging from educating the reader in certain areas, bringing up current problems, deepening the psychological aspect of individual characters etc. The published volume brings forth various aspects of this new role of place in popular genres centering on crime and gives space to its deeper analysis. It is not the researchers´ objective to provide overviews of the history of the theoretical discussion of place and space in literature in general. Instead, although the essays do employ a variety of critical approaches, the collection strives to show practically how place and space is employed in the specific material of the selected works.The seven chapters are written by scholars from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. Two essays represent London as a topos and a chronotope in the works by contemporary British writers of crime fiction. The selection is to show how varied the literary London can be, albeit in the often rather formulaic popular genre. The essays also document a shift from the country setting typical for the British Golden Age of detective fiction to the more recent urban focus. One contribution focuses on the genre of spy novel to show how rendering of place and space can contribute to the genre’s typical atmosphere of suspense, secrets and disquiet. Four more essays analyze a variety of places and spaces in American crime fiction, crime comics and crime film. All of the places are in some way specific to American milieu – the suburbia, the university campus, the wilderness, a holiday resort with a state park. These essays are designed to show the contemporary variety of places where crime literature (or film) is set and to document a shift from the traditional urban setting of American hard-boiled fiction to a far greater recent diversity.The volume brings together most recent central European research on the topic of place and community in popular imagination. Thus, it represents a unique insight into this growing phenomenon, which can no longer be overlooked by the academic community.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a key technique in the medical imaging area, which allows to diagnose the organism functions and to track the tumor changes. In PET measurement the patient is injected with radiotracer, containing a large number of metastable atoms of radionuclide, that emmits positrons. As the result of positron annihilation, the two photons travelling off with nearly opposite directions are produced and registered by detection system positioned so that it surrounds the patient body. State-of-the-art PET scanners use scintillation crystals which are characterized by high detection efficiency of annihilation photons. In this context, it is worth to mention that the Jagiellonian PET (J-PET) Collaboration developed a novel whole-body PET scanner based on plastic scintillators. They are much cheaper than crystal scintillators, which gives the opportunity to reduce the high cost of PET scanners and make them more affordable. However, plastic scintillators have much lower detection efficiency of gamma quanta compared to inorganic scintillation crystals. This can be compensated by increasing the scanner field of view and improving the time resolution in the measurement of the time of flight of gamma quanta. The J-PET scanner consists of plastic scintillator strips read out at both ends by a pair of photomultipliers and arranged axially around a cylindrical tomograph tunnel. The axial coordinate of the annihilation photon interaction point in the scintillator strip is derived from the difference of the light propagation time measured with the pair of photomultipliers. The operational principles of the J-PET scanner are similar to conventional tomographs, except that the highly accurate time information is of paramount importance. Therefore, the J-PET scanner demands a preparation of novel methods on each step of the data processing. The goal of the work presented in this dissertation is a development of the signal and image processing algorithms taking into account uniqueness of the J-PET detector. The proposed methods include: signal recovery based on samples of a waveform registered on photomultiplier output, reconstruction of position and time of interaction of annihilation photon in the scintillator strip, classification of PET events types and image reconstruction that operates exclusively in the image space. Due to the dissimilarity from the conventional PET scanners, majority of the methods presented in this dissertation are innovative solutions in digital signal and image processing in tomography.