Polish Studies – serie

Seven inter-war plays by Polish women writers created a flurry of excitement and condemnation when they appeared, yet today they are almost forgotten. This groundbreaking study interrogates the feminism of these plays and their authors, who dared to question national myths, subvert genre expectations, and reinterpret definitions of subjectivity, anticipating the work of numerous women playwrights in post-1989 Poland. Synthesizing a variety of theoretical perspectives, the author produces a nuanced reading of each work and of the group as a whole. Both texts and the innovative synthetic approach will interest scholars of Polish literature, of drama, and of gender studies.

This volume collects the critical prose of award-winning writer Anna Frajlich. The Ghost of Shakespeare takes its name from Frajlich’s essay on Nobel Prize laureate Wisława Szymborska, but informs her approach as a comparativist more generally as she considers the work of major Polish writers of the twentieth century, including Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Bruno Schulz. Frajlich’s study of the Roman theme in Russian Symbolism owes its origins to her stay in the Eternal City, the second stop on her exile from Poland in 1969. The book concludes with autobiographical essays that describe her parents’ dramatic flight from Poland at the outbreak of the war, her own exile from Poland in 1969, settling in New York City, and building her career as a scholar and leading poet of her generation.

Engaging Cultural Ideologies offers a recontextualization of the effects of Poland’s cultural practices, especially those concerning issues such as nationalism, elitism, and race, on the genesis and performance of contemporary Polish compositions from 1918 to 1956. Based on extensive archival research that includes the first comprehensive examination of concert programs in Poland as well as a series of case studies focused on composers’ challenges in the midst of nearly constant turmoil, Bylander brings fresh insights into the public and private power struggles concerning artistic freedom that were animated by similar points of contention across seemingly diverse historical eras.