Family and Artistic Relations in Polish Women’s Autobiographical Literature examines women’s autobiographical works published in Poland after the year 2000 in a broader cultural context. This volume focuses on the writers’ representation of their relationships with their mothers – many of them traumatized survivors of historical cataclysms, many of them professional artists, many of them struggling to reconcile their creative work with their role as wife and mother. Grzemska sheds light not only on the literary strategies used by the memoirists, but she also helps us understand women’s struggles for an independent voice, for new models of commemoration, for healing. This book will interest readers in literary and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wishes to better understand Poland’s cultural transformations in the post-Communist era.

Psychoanalysis and Narrative analyzes narrative in literary fiction, film, and autobiography through different psychoanalytic lenses including gender and socio-cultural perspectives. This book aims to demonstrate how fictionists and film makers have intuitively developed – through their own creativity – many of the psychoanalytic discoveries about the human mind. Subverting the usual direction of “applied psychoanalysis,” the book goes from creativity to psychoanalysis, and focuses on four internationally known Argentine writers: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, and Luisa Valenzuela; two Argentine women filmmakers, Lucrecia Martel and Lucía Puenzo; and French essayist and writer Serge Doubrovsky. This volume will be of interest to students and academics interested in autobiography and autofiction.

Family and Artistic Relations in Polish Women's Autobiographical Literature examines women's autobiographical works published in Poland after the year 2000 in a broader cultural context. This volume focuses on the writers' representation of their relationships with their mothers - many of them traumatized survivors of historical cataclysms, many of them professional artists, many of them struggling to reconcile their creative work with their role as wife and mother. Grzemska sheds light not only on the literary strategies used by the memoirists, but she also helps us understand women's struggles for an independent voice, for new models of commemoration, for healing. This book will interest readers in literary and cultural studies as well as anyone who wishes to better understand Poland's cultural transformations in the post-Communist era.

Mark Twain, the great American writer of the South whose characters struggle with difficult choices, famously said: “Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.” Taking Twain’s phrase as a starting point, this book considers how literature and art explore different systems of values and principles of conduct, and how they can teach us to cope at times of trial. Morality remains one of the most contested areas of thought and ethics in the modern world, due to numerous misapprehensions and the move away from solidarity, from what we share and hold in common, particularly our inherent pursuit of virtue and consideration of principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong, good and bad. Featuring essays by scholars from countries which have seen traditions of virtue and character formation perish in the course of tragic social experiments, this book highlights the role of literature and arts in educating about virtues and character, in both a regional and global context. The volume offers philosophical analysis of moral education and engages with the literary canon, discussing the ways in which virtue was taught and can still be taught with Aristotle as one of the regained “tools of learning.” The essays span countries from England, Spain, Italy and Belgium to the USA, Costa Rica, ancient China and Israel, with Poland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Central Europe receiving considerable coverage. They address themes of virtue and character formation from the Bronze Age to the present and serve as inspiring reading for educators, literary scholars, historians, ethicists, artists and active readers.

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.