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Choucas
The novel in Europe in the early twentieth century took a decidedly inward turn, and Choucas (1927) is an intriguing example of the modernist psychological tradition. Its author, Zofia Nalkowska (1884–1954), was a celebrated Polish novelist and playwright. She rose to prominence in interwar Poland and was one of a group of early feminist writers that included Pola Gojawiczynska, Maria Dabrowska, and Maria Kuncewiczowa. Choucas is set in the Swiss Alps in the mid-1920s in a sanatoria village near Lake Geneva. The book has an international focus, and the narrator, a polish woman, profiles a motley collection of visitors to the village and patients at the sanatorium and their interactions wit...
The Politics of Love
The Politics of Love describes the history of Polish intellectual and cultural life, which covertly flourished at home and abroad despite imperial repression between Poland's two great uprisings in 1830–1831 and 1863. Natalie Cornett focuses her study on a group of educated women known as the "Enthusiasts" (Entuzjastki), who were united by their commitment to live as independent women despite the intense nationalism that put the nation above all—including class and gender. The Enthusiasts, led by Narcyza Żmichowska, emphasized sororal love and homosocial bonding in their program to contest both an oppressive imperial regime and constrictive gender roles. Their affective relationships wi...
The Heathen
Narcyza Zmichowska (1819–76) was the most accomplished female writer to come out of Poland in the mid-nineteenth century. In terms of influence and popularity, she was the George Eliot of East European letters, but her fiction was written less in the realist style than in the Romantic one. Her novel The Heathen, rendered here in a crystalline English translation by Ursula Phillips, is the tale of a doomed love affair between Benjamin, a young man from a poor but patriotic rural family, and Aspasia, a femme fatale who is older, beautiful, worldlier, and more sexually liberated. As the story unfolds, Benjamin falls in love with Aspasia, accompanies her to Warsaw, and under her influence achi...
Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Polish Women's Writing
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.
Another Canon
Polish contemporary literature is not a closed book to European and world readers. Those not involved professionally in the production or study of literature may well have heard of Stanisaw Lem, Witold Gombrowicz, Czesaw Miosz, Wisawa Szymborska or the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018, Olga Tokarczuk. The situation is different with Polish literature of earlier periods, including the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. The works of Ignacy Krasicki, Micha Czajkowski, J'ozef Ignacy Kraszewski, Eliza Orzeszkowa, Maria Komornicka, Stefan Zeromski and Bolesaw Prus - the exception perhaps is Henryk Sienkiewicz, whose novels were translated into many languages - did not enter European circulation on any large scale and have rarely been included in comparative studies. Our book attempts to change this perspective and poses the question as to whether another - expanded and more inclusive - literary canon is possible.
Estranging the Novel
"The author's comparative approach to studying literary form makes a forceful case for a more geographically and formally expansive vision of the novel"--
Malvina, or the Heart’s Intuition
First published in Warsaw in 1816, Malvina, or the Heart's Intuition has been largely—and unjustly—ignored by the Polish literary canon. Ingeniously structured and vividly related by a Tristram Shandy-esque narrator, Maria Wirtemberska's psychologically complex work is often considered Poland's first modern novel. This splendid translation by Ursula Phillips should restore Wirtemberska to her rightful place in the literary pantheon while providing fertile new ground for the study of the international development of the novel. The romantic story of the young widow Malvina and her mysterious lover Ludomir, Malvina combines several literary styles and influences—from the epistolary to the...
Boundary
Available for the first time in English, Zofia Nalkowska's Boundary was originally published as Granica in Poland in 1935. The modernist novel was widely discussed upon its publication and praised for its psychological realism and stylistic and compositional artistry. Over the years, it has been translated into several languages and made into a feature film, and remains a standard text in the Polish secondary school curriculum. Nalkowska was a pioneer of feminist fiction in Central Europe. Her observation of inequality in the treatment of men and women is at the heart of Boundary, which explores a transgressive love affair and its repercussions. She perceived that men—especially of the upp...
