A History of Polish Literature

E-Book (PDF) Availability:  Published ISBN:  978-90-04-42961-1 Publication Date:  31 Aug 2020 Hardback Availability:  Published ISBN:  978-90-04-42959-8 Publication Date:  03 Sep 2020

A Generic History of Travel Writing in Anglophone and Polish Literature offers a comprehensive, comparative and generic analysis of developments of travel writing in Anglophone and Polish literature from the Late Medieval Period to the twenty-first century. These developments are depicted in a wider context of travel narratives written in other European languages. Grzegorz Moroz convincingly argues that, for all the similarities and cross-cultural influences, in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century non-fiction Anglophone and Polish travel writing have dynamically evolved different generic horizons of expectations. While the Anglophone travel book developed relatively steadily in that period, the Polish genre of the podróż was first replaced by the listy (kartki) z podróży, and then by the reportaż podróżniczy.

The title of this monograph, Odpamiętywanie polsko-żydowskie [‘Polish-Jewish Re-Remembering’], refers to the post-1989, thirty-year-long process of reviving attention to Polish-Jewish relations in historical, cultural, and literary studies, including the impact of Polish Jews on the development of Polish culture, their presence in Polish social life, and the relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. That process had been preceded by a long period of silence that fell on the centuries-old presence of Jews in the Polish Commonwealth after their extermination by the Nazis. Jewish studies in the years 1945–1989, concerning both the very presence of Jews and their annihilation in the Holocaust, were very limited: the Communist authorities were interested in neither. As a result, the majority of Poles mentally operate with the Jewish world from before the World War II and with the Shoah as mere artefacts of the cultural processes of post-memory. (From Introduction)

This book brings together papers that were presented at a workshop in May 2018 to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Szmul Zygielbojm’s protest suicide. The workshop was organised at The Polish University Abroad within the framework of an ongoing seminar series on twentieth century Polish history.5 The volume opens with a message from Zygielbojm’s grandsons, Dr Arthur I. Zygielbaum and Paul S. Zygielbaum, to participants of the workshop (see p. 11), in which they highlight the continuing relevance of their grandfather’s sacrifice (Michael Fleming, Introduction).