Urszula Chowaniec

Ursula Phillips

Marja Rytkönen

Masquerade and Femininity: Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers introduces the reader to the diversity of women’s writing in Poland and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries in the light of the notion of masquerade. The present articles scrutinize particular works by women writers (Nadezhda Dmitrievna Khvoshchinskaia, Irina Odoevtseva, Vera Pavlova, Narcyza Żmichowska, Maria Komornicka, Irena Krzywicka and others) and the strategies of masquerading female experience. Taken together, the articles draw attention to the feeling of an inexpressible gap between the living body (and its everyday life experience of pain and suffering or happiness and pleasure) and the culturally constructed, powerfully imposed code of expression that readily makes use of various masks, guises and acts of pretending, applied especially cleverly in literary works. The concept of masquerade illuminates the complexity of what we call “femininity” by combining two sides of the divide: the real feelings and the constructed expressions. This volume uses both feminist and non-feminist approaches to women’s writing and sheds new light on the themes of femininity, woman’s identity, experience, masks, body, gender relations, nature, culture and authorship. Masquerade and Femininity brings together East European literary studies and gender studies, offering a comparative perspective on literature, literary theory and cultural phenomena in Poland and Russia, and featuring a range of both eastern European and western scholars. In its pages, the reader is invited to move beyond Russian literature and language into a dialogic approach between Slavic literatures. This book will also contribute to filling the comparative gap which is still relatively unexplored not only with regard to the application of western scholarship to East European studies, but also with regard to the dialogue between Russian and Polish scholarship.

Essays on Russian and Polish Women Writers

Masquerade and Femininity

Małgorzata Czermińska

Grażyna Borkowska

przewodnik

Pisarki polskie od średniowiecza do współczesności

Every time a so-called “woman’s voice” appears in the media in connection with any sphere of creative activity, it finds itself confronted by the almost formulaic expression “feminism today,” instantaneously suggesting that feminism is, in fact, a matter of the past, and that if we want to return to this phenomenon, then we need to explain ourselves. Women’s Voices and Feminism in Polish Cultural Memory seeks to elaborate the problem of generalization, expressed by such formulas as “feminism today,” while analysing how feminist sympathies have shaped Polish literature, film and language. This volume does not want to impose any hegemonic understanding of “feminism,” or imply any a priori ideological assumptions about women’s “nature” or role in society. It seeks to identify what is particular to the Polish feminist experience. It starts by asking such questions as “what is feminism today?” or “what can we learn from the history of Polish women’s writing?” In answering these questions, the women scholars who have contributed to the volume examine Polish cultural history and memory in the context of the transformations, transitions and catastrophes of the last two centuries, whilst firmly rooting Polish experience within the common European heritage.

Women’s Voices and Feminism in Polish Cultural Memory

Stanislaw Eile

Serves as an introduction to contemporary Polish literature, developed through critical discussion of key problems and representative writers. It includes poetry, fiction and drama. Some essays are devoted to individual writers including, Milosz, Herbert, Gombrowicz, Schulz, Konwicki and Mrozek.

Flight from Martyrology

New Perspectives in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature

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)

Polish Literature in Transformation

Kirsi Kurkijärvi

The volume encompasses eleven articles which discuss the critical views that Polish and Russian women writers have articulated with regard to the notion of experience and constructions of femininity in the national imagination from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Major themes of the articles include women s experiences as writers in the 19th century; women s embodied experiences of a traumatic past; body and sexuality in the different ages of women; political and aesthetic discourses and femininity. Although the articles are arranged in chronological order, they do not form an absolute chronological or periodic continuum, i.e. from Romanticism to Postmodernism, although references to certain aesthetic periods are made. The authors of the articles reflect in detail on how the women writers and their literary texts represent different understandings and experiences in relation to dominant perceptions, for example, of the memory of war, of motherhood, of art and aesthetics, and so on. Readers are encouraged to seek parallels and continuities between the different historical times and spaces; between women s writing in Russia and Poland; between different scholarly approaches and aims. The articles of this volume bring together important critical standpoints in women s writing in Poland and Russia, in which parallels, continuities, and resemblances can be traced, but in which discontinuities, breaks and differences also make themselves visible. Apart from the conspicuous resemblances between individual Russian and Polish women writers works, or even between groups of women writers, the articles document the diversity within Russian and Polish women s writing, respectively, and even within individual writers.

Ursula Phillips

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