This volume emerged from the conference "Polish Literature Since 1989" held at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. It shows how the profound political and economic transformation that has taken place in Poland since the end of communism in 1989 has affected literary culture and literary scholarship, such as: changing conceptions of Polish nationhood and identity * the impact of European integration (since 2004) * the effects of migration * revised conceptions of the foreign or the marginal, and new understandings of what is understood by emigre or emigrant literature * sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity, as well as the impact of feminism and queer studies * the huge impact of revived interest in the Jewish heritage, in Holocaust memory, and in Polish-Jewish relations. (Series: Polonistik im Kontext - Vol. 2)

Poland has carried out two peaceful revolutions in the span of one generation: first, the self-limiting movement of Solidarity, which undermined the legitimacy of Communism and then a negotiated transfer of power from Communism to free market democracy. Today, while Poland is seen as a success story and is joining political and economic associations in the democratic West, Poles themselves seem downcast. They ask: is social anomie a price worth paying for a successful transformation? In making moral compromises with an outgoing tyranny, can one avoid cynicism and disappointment with democracy? Zbigniew Brzezinski, professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University has called Polish Transformation "a work that provides a comprehensive as well as incisive overview of the extraordinary difficult and historically unprecedented process of transforming an increasingly corrupt and decayed totalitarian system into a modern democracy." John Lenczowski, director of the Institute of World Politics, adds that "this extremely useful volume explains the essential elements of the post-communist political transition in Poland. Its authors convey...the cultural and ideological underpinnings that can be captured only by authorities who have developed over a lifetime that special sixth sense for detecting the elusive and unquantifiable soul of a country." Radek Sikorski, the executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that "we should be grateful to the authors and editors of this thoughtful volume for asking questions which remain relevant for that uncomfortably large part of humanity that still lives under totalitarian or authoritarian regimes." Marek Jan Chodakiewicz holds the Kosciuszko chair in Polish Studies at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is the author of After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II and Between Nazis and Soviets: A Case Study of Occupation Politics in Politics, 1939-1947. John Radzilowski is author and editor of numerous works ranging from Polish to East European history. Darius Tolczyk is associate professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Virginia. He is the author of See No Evil: Literary Cover-Ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience.

The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature offers an introduction to Polish literature through thirty-three case studies, covering works from the Middle Ages up to the present day. Each chapter draws on a text or body of work, examining its historical context, as well as its international reception and position within world literature. The book presents a dual perspective on Polish literature, combining original readings of key texts with discussions of their two-way connections with other literatures across the globe. With a detailed introduction offering a narrative overview, the book is divided into six sections offering a chronological pathway through the material. Contributors from around the world examine the various cultural exchanges at play, with each chapter including: Definitions of key terms and brief overviews of historical and political events, literary eras, trends, movements, groups, and institutions for those new to the area Analysis and notes on translations, including their hidden dimensions and potential Textual focus on poetics, such as strategies of composition, style, and genre A range of historical, sociological, political, and economic contexts From medieval song through to the contemporary novel, this book offers an interpretive history of Polish literature, while also positioning its significance within world literature. The detailed introductions make it accessible to beginners in the area, while the original analysis and focused case studies will also be of interest to researchers.

This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day. The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called “the world republic of letters.”

The book takes an in-depth look at a hitherto unexplored part of the oeuvre of prominent Polish economist and historian of economic thought Tadeusz Kowalik: his thesis that the systemic transformation that took place in Poland in the late 1980s was a de facto "epigonic bourgeois revolution". Since Kowalik actually never extended his argument to support this thesis, the aim of the book is to answer the following question: If some important reflections on the revolutionary character of the Polish transformation scattered throughout Kowalik's works were to be found, would they together constitute a convincing justification for the thesis of the "epigonic bourgeois revolution"?

Anna Nasilowska's A History of Polish Literature is a one-volume guide that immerses readers in the rich tapestry of Polish literature and reveals its enduring impact on European identity from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. By exploring key themes, writers, and works and grounding her discussion in crucial biographical context, she weaves together the lives of a carefully curated list of Polish writers to paint a vivid literary portrait, elucidating the epochs that these writers shaped. Offering indispensable insights for readers who may be unfamiliar with the world of Polish literature, it is an excellent jumping-off-point for further study and learning.

Examines how contemporary German and Polish novels reimagine borderlands as cosmopolitan spaces by engaging in border poetics, a narrative practice that relates political borders to figurative boundaries.Globalization notwithstanding, we live in an age of borders, as the ongoing conflict at Europe's eastern edge reminds us. Borders are meant to protect, but they more often divide and exclude. This book, however, focuses on literature that pushes back against the divisiveness of borders, advocating for transborder connections and criticizing exclusionary boundaries. It examines novels that reimagine past and present German-Polish borderlands as cosmopolitan spaces. Novels by Nobel Prize winners Olga Tokarczuk and Günter Grass are discussed alongside works by authors less well known internationally: the Polish Inga Iwasiów, the German Tanja Dückers, and the German-Polish Sabrina Janesch.The book utilizes and elaborates the concept of border poetics, a narrative and cultural practice that places political borders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.ders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.ders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.ders in relation to less concrete borders such as those of gender, ethnicity, or class, as well as in relation to epistemological and ontological boundaries: of language, knowledge, even reality. Because border poetics rests on the same productive tension between the particular and the universal that drives contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism, the book argues for the practice as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.e as an expression of what sociologist Gerard Delanty has termed "cosmopolitan imagination." The richly contextualized analysis is framed within transnational German Studies and draws on border studies, cosmopolitanism, European literature, and world literature.

This book offers new critical approaches for the study of adaptations, abridgments, translations, parodies, and mash-ups that occur internationally in contemporary children's culture. It follows recent shifts in adaptation studies that call for a move beyond fidelity criticism, a paradigm that measures the success of an adaptation by the level of fidelity to the "original" text, toward a methodology that considers the adaptation to be always already in conversation with the adapted text. This book visits children's literature and culture in order to consider the generic, pedagogical, and ideological underpinnings that drive both the process and the product. Focusing on novels as well as folktales, films, graphic novels, and anime, the authors consider the challenges inherent in transforming the work of authors such as William Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and A.A. Milne into new forms that are palatable for later audiences particularly when--for perceived ideological or political reasons--the textual transformation is not only unavoidable but entirely necessary. Contributors consider the challenges inherent in transforming stories and characters from one type of text to another, across genres, languages, and time, offering a range of new models that will inform future scholarship.

This edited volume analyses and discusses the systematisation of Polish socio-economic transformations of the last three decades using selected examples of the most important changes. 1989 marked the onset of the political transformation process in Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The transition involved a shift from a socialist system to a parliamentary democracy and from a command economy to a market one. Due to the deep economic crisis that culminated in 1988 and the peaceful model of change developed and implemented in Poland, the magnitude and manner of implementing various initiatives was unprecedented and had specific implications. This transformation opened Polish society and the Polish economy to the impact of global social and economic changes, triggering successive transformations, often overlapping in terms of their causes and consequences. This publication aims to present the course and effects, in particular territorial, of Poland's socio-economic transformation in the years 1990–2020. The analysis covers the key aspects of this transformation, illustrated with references to the concepts and theories of development, domestic and foreign literature, own empirical research and existing or newly developed model approaches to transformation in the territorial dimension. The book appeals to researchers and student in the fields of geography, spatial management, economics and business, sociology and political sciences, public and private economic research institutes, employees of governmental bodies and corporations, consultants in public administration, journalists and policymakers.

Made in Poland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary Polish popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of Polish music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Poland and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Poland, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Popular Music in the People’s Republic of Poland; Documenting Change and Continuity in Music Scenes and Institutions; and Music, Identity, and Critique.