The paper is an attempt to examine background of modern regionalism in Polish literery studies. The author poses also a question on the broader cultural context of the focus on ‘regional’. She starts from Sentimental and Romantic interests in local spatial issues. Then she goes through various ways of collecting and examining regional folklore in the second half of 19th and the begining of 20th century. And finally she presents interwar theoretical works in which regionalism was appearing as a term and as a method, as a paradigm of a holistic approach towards literature.