Maria Janion, a literary scholar and renowned researcher of Romanticism, is one of the undisputed intellectual authorities in Poland. She has always engaged in political debates and in recent years has used her prominence to support the women's movement and the revived New Left. As early as the early 1980s, she introduced authors such as Foucault, Bataille, Susan Sontag, and R.D. Laing to Poland. Her students are the initiators of Polish gender studies. At the center of her work is the concept of "krytyka fantasmatyczna," which involves questioning literature, film, and art regarding their imaginary potentials, conscious and unconscious cultural notions, and self- and other-images that are effective in aesthetic forms. A significant romantic phantasm is the vampire as a doppelgänger and shadow, serving as a symbolic figure for transgression.