Welcome to the LITR 200 Research Guide! Use the research tools below to find sources on your research topic.
The library catalog is a great place to start your research. Here are some tips to make searching more effective:
✅ Sign in to the library catalog
Before you begin searching, make sure you're signed in. This gives you access to full-text materials, allows you to save searches, set alerts, and bookmark items to your favorites.
🔗 Use Boolean Operators to Combine Keywords
Boolean operators help you refine your search:
Examples:
Cold War AND Poland AND censorship
→ Returns results that include all three concepts.
Miłosz AND ("The Captive Mind" OR "Native Realm")
→ Finds works by Czesław Miłosz that match either title.
Solidarity AND Poland NOT Wałęsa
→ Finds materials about the Solidarity movement in Poland that do not mention Lech Wałęsa.
Tip: Boolean operators must be typed in ALL CAPS: AND, OR, NOT.
✂️ Use Truncation and Wildcards
Truncation: Use an asterisk * to find word variations.
Example: communis* → finds communism, communist, communists, etc.
Wildcard: Use a question mark ? to replace a single character.
Example: wom?n → finds woman and women.
Group Terms with Parentheses
Use parentheses to combine multiple ideas:
Narrow by Genre, Place, or Time
Being Poland
by
Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose
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Twentieth-century Polish literature is often said to be a "witness to history," a narrative of the historical and political disasters that visited the nation. In this insightful book, Jaroslaw Anders examines Poland's modern poetry and fiction and explains that the best Polish writing of the period 1918-1989 was much more than testimony. Rather, it constantly transformed historical experience into metaphysical reflection, a philosophical or religious exploration of human existence. Anders analyzes and contextualizes the work of nine modern Polish writers. These include the "three madmen" of the interwar period--Schulz, Gombrowicz, and Witkiewicz, whom he calls the fathers of Polish modernist prose; the great poets of the war generation--Milosz, Herbert, and Szymborska; Herling-Grudzinski and Konwicki, with their dark philosophical subtexts; and the mystical-ecstatic poet Zagajewski. A collection of essays representing Anders's thinking over several decades, "Between Fire and Sleep" offers a fresh understanding of modern Polish literature and cultural identity.
A History of Polish Literature
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Anna Nasilowska's A History of Polish Literature is a one-volume guide that immerses readers in the rich tapestry of Polish literature and reveals its enduring impact on European identity from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. By exploring key themes, writers, and works and grounding her discussion in crucial biographical context, she weaves together the lives of a carefully curated list of Polish writers to paint a vivid literary portrait, elucidating the epochs that these writers shaped. Offering indispensable insights for readers who may be unfamiliar with the world of Polish literature, it is an excellent jumping-off-point for further study and learning.
Polish Literature and National Identity
by
A postcolonial study of Polish literature from Romanticism to the twenty-first centuryFor nearly half a century East-Central Europe was part of the Soviet empire and was subject to its "civilizing" mission. Despite its colonial status, this part of the world has escaped the attention of most postcolonial critics and remains a blank spot in global studies of postcolonialism. Dariusz Skorczewski is among the first scholars to apply postcolonial thought to Polish realities, at the same time modifying the theoretical framework developed by other scholars of postcolonialism. Polish Literature and National Identity reveals how the experiences of foreign domination and the history of empire have shaped contemporary Polish culture and society. The book, newly translated from the Polish, introduces Anglophone audiences to the potential implications of postcolonial studies on an understanding of Poland's unique historical position within Europe. Skorczewski explores transformations of national identity as reflected in Polish literature and critical discourse from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. The narrative thus tackles questions surrounding Poland's postcolonial status in contemporary East-CentralEurope, a region where globalization and cosmopolitanism clash with resurgent national sentiments and where predictions about a speedy transition to a postnational era now seem premature. DARIUSZ SKORCZEWSKI is associate professor of Polish literature at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin.
The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry
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An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. What's in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Białoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Różewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. Kremer's is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments-from poetic "sound postcards," to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.
A Time for the Province
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Within discourses on Polish provincial or marginal literature, the eastern borderlands are a richly symbolic region that inspires much fascination and study. Through close readings, surveys, and analyses of transborder narratives by seven modern writers who hailed from the Polish borderlands or set their works there, A Time for the Province demonstrates how the region has come to represent a palimpsest of cultural identities and myths as each new generation unearths and rediscovers them. George Gasyna explores and theorizes the province as a space of grand utopian visions and dystopic gestures about both the Polish past and a Polish future. Offering a novel literary and cultural history of modern Polish writing, he paves the way toward productive new modes of conceptualizing the cultural and literary forms that have come from Central Europe over the last century, challenging many basic assumptions about what this literature can offer its readership in Poland and around the world. Through engagement with the theoretical apparatuses of postmemory studies and border studies, A Time for the Province redefines Polish cultural identity in the current moment of postsocialist transition and globalized citizenship.
Wanderers Across Language
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Wanderers Across Language
Writers, Literature and Censorship in Poland. 1948-1958
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The book describes the system of communist censorship in Poland in the years 1948-1958, as well as its effects on the development of literature. It is the first literary studies work which takes up the subject in such broad and systematic terms. The book is divided into three main parts: an attempt at synthesis (theory and practice of censorship), special cases (censorship of specific writers), authorial strategies (the authors' ways of dealing with censorship) and contexts. The most important conclusion which can be drawn from the research is that out of many small changes emerges an image of a very significant one. Numerous small cuts and alterations build up to an image of Polish literature of the 1940s and 1950s as a whole. A whole that was always dependant on and subservient to politics.
