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This novel, set in the 1970s, tells the story of the "author" - a middle-aged Polish professor who lives abroad but who earlier survived the Nazi concentration camps - and Rudolf, an old man. In the 1930s Rudolf, the son of Germans living in Poland, rebelled against the expectations of both his parents and Polish society by leading an openly gay life in Paris. Rudolf and the author meet by chance in Brussels, and the novel unfolds as Rudolf attempts to convince the author - and himself - that his choices were good ones, that his life and the memories he has of it were worth whatever he gave up for them.
Throughout the twentieth century in Poland various ideologies attempted to keep queer voices silent—whether those ideologies were fascist, communist, Catholic, or neo-liberal. Despite these pressures, there existed a vibrant, transgressive trend within Polish literature that subverted such silencing. This book provides in-depth textual analyses of several of those texts, covering nearly every decade of the last century, and includes authors such as Witold Gombrowicz, Marian Pankowski, and Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Jack J. B. Hutchens demonstrates the subversive power of each work, showing that through their transgressions they help to undermine nationalist and homophobic ideologies that are still at play in Poland today. Hutchens argues that the transgressive reading of Polish literature can challenge the many binaries on which conservative, heteronormative ideology depends in order to maintain its cultural hegemony.
The liber amicorum is a collection of 40 articles written by Polish, Russian, Belgian and French philologists about the themes of the jubilarian's interests and academic research: general linguistics, comparatism and etymology, relations between Poland and the World, modern Polish literature, Russian literature and culture (18-20th century). The contributions are representative for the varied horizon of historical, linguistic, literary and cultural interests of Prof. Skalmowski.
This is the first comparative study of literature written by writers who fled from East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It includes not only interpretations of individual lives and literary works, but also studies of the most important literary journals, publishers, radio programs, and other aspects of exile literary cultures. The theoretical part of introduction distinguishes between exiles, émigrés, and expatriates, while the historical part surveys the pre-twentieth-century exile traditions and provides an overview of the exilic events between 1919 and 1995; one section is devoted to exile cultures in Paris, London, and New York, as well as in Moscow, Madrid, Toronto, Bueno...
Although the title of this sensitive collection refers to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, City of Ash serves as a universal geography of the contemporary soul in an urban context. Through his poetry, Eugenijus Alisanka searches for personal and historical meaning within the framework of time, recognizing both the demands of the self and the impossibility of avoiding what came before, whether human or cultural.
Winner of the Ksaver Šandor Gjalski Prize These are the first two volumes of the Croatian poet and novelist Irena Vrkljan's lyrical autobiography. Although each novel illuminates the other, they also stand alone as original and independent works of art. In The Silk, the Shears, Vrkljan traces the symbolic and moral significance of her life, and her vision of the fate of women in her mother's time and in her own. Marina continues the intense analysis of the poetic self, using the life of Marina Tsvetaeva to meditate on the processes behind biography.
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Reading contemporary women’s writing as melancholy texts highlights their often under-explored neuralgic nature and emancipatory value. These “strangers in their own lands,” as most recent Polish women writers and their work were described, are the subject of detailed analysis in this book, and are also positioned as the mirrors in which those lands are reflected. From this perspective, the melancholic strands in women’s writing are drawn together to provide a diagnosis of the current situation in Poland, taking into account unwanted discourses, unwelcomed subjects and unresolved problems. Melancholic Migrating Bodies offers the first systematic overview of Poland’s literary and cultural environment after 1989 from the perspective of women’s writing. It critically surveys the various political and social transformations of this period through a close reading of the foremost Polish female novelists. In this original way, the book adopts a fresh perspective on some of the country’s key questions, such as Catholicism, nationalism, the patriotic ethos, history, romantic mythology and the problem of memory.
The Fortress is one of the most significant and fascinating novels to come out of the former Yugoslavia. Ahmet Shabo returns home to eighteenth-century Sarajevo from the war in Russia, numbed by the death in battle or suicide of nearly his entire military unit. In time he overcomes the anguish of war, only to find that he has emerged a reflective and contemplative man in a society that does not value, and will not tolerate, the subversive implications of these qualities.
David Albahari is one of the most prominent writers to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in the last twenty years. His serious, understated explorations of the self have influenced many writers of his native land's younger generation. The narrator of Bait has just exiled himself to Canada after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the death of his mother. As he listens to a series of audio tapes recorded by the mother years before, the narrator ponders her life and their relationship while simultaneously trying to come to terms with a new life of his own-one of exile and the confusion of a new language and culture. Bait is an exquisitely crafted novel that exhibits the wit and raw honesty Albahari's readers have long admired.