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.

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.

Reading contemporary women’s writing as melancholy texts highlights their often under-explored neuralgic nature and emancipatory value. These “strangers in their own lands,” as most recent Polish women writers and their work were described, are the subject of detailed analysis in this book, and are also positioned as the mirrors in which those lands are reflected. From this perspective, the melancholic strands in women’s writing are drawn together to provide a diagnosis of the current situation in Poland, taking into account unwanted discourses, unwelcomed subjects and unresolved problems. Melancholic Migrating Bodies offers the first systematic overview of Poland’s literary and cultural environment after 1989 from the perspective of women’s writing. It critically surveys the various political and social transformations of this period through a close reading of the foremost Polish female novelists. In this original way, the book adopts a fresh perspective on some of the country’s key questions, such as Catholicism, nationalism, the patriotic ethos, history, romantic mythology and the problem of memory.

The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of ‘great history’ whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers’ work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.

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)

Throughout the twentieth century in Poland various ideologies attempted to keep queer voices silent—whether those ideologies were fascist, communist, Catholic, or neo-liberal. Despite these pressures, there existed a vibrant, transgressive trend within Polish literature that subverted such silencing. This book provides in-depth textual analyses of several of those texts, covering nearly every decade of the last century, and includes authors such as Witold Gombrowicz, Marian Pankowski, and Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Jack J. B. Hutchens demonstrates the subversive power of each work, showing that through their transgressions they help to undermine nationalist and homophobic ideologies that are still at play in Poland today. Hutchens argues that the transgressive reading of Polish literature can challenge the many binaries on which conservative, heteronormative ideology depends in order to maintain its cultural hegemony.