Complicating the Female Subject

Professor of Polish and Russian at Northern Illinois University, Joanna Kot has written extensively on Polish and Russian modernist drama, including the monograph Distance Manipulation: The Russian Modernist Search for a New Drama. Her recent work focuses on 1930s Polish women playwrights as important predecessors to contemporary feminist drama.

"This is a daring and thought-provoking book for all theater lovers. Joann Kot's comprehensive study revives archival theater scripts and forgotten plays of Poland's inter-war "women's drama" in a way that energizes and delights. Reading her analysis makes us rethink the mechanisms of theater and the structures of domination at the same time. This ostensibly modest rediscovery, conducted in a bi-lingual format proposed by Kot, also reveals the rich suppressed heritage behind Polish women's voices today asserting clearly that the country's national stage history needs to be seen anew, in a brighter and fuller light."

• Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Women and Drama in Other Western Modernisms 2. Inter-War Poland 3. Who Were They? A Short Biographical Introduction 4. What Are They? Plot Summaries of the Plays 5. Theorizing the Subject: Seeing Through an Essentialist Lens 6. Theorizing the Subject: Possibilities of Change 7. The Subject Vis-à- Vis Cultural Myths 8. Dramatic Fissures 9. Inter-War Critical Reception Conclusion Bibliography Index