This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day.
The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called "the world republic of letters."
Ahlberg, Sofia: - Sofia Ahlberg is Vice Dean at the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Beebee, Thomas Oliver: - Thomas O. Beebee is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German, Penn State University, USA. He is the author of Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002 (2008), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (1994) and Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction (1990).
Florczyk, Piotr: - Piotr Florczyk is Assistant Professor of Global Literary Studies at the University of Washington, USA, and an award-winning poet and translator. His recent books include the poetry collection From the Annals of Kraków, which is based on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, as well as numerous volumes of translations, including Invisible, the selected poems of Jacek Gutorow, which was named Autumn 2021 Translation Choice by Poetry Book Society in the UK. www.piotrflorczyk.com
Wisniewski, K. A.: - K. A. Wisniewski currently serves as the Director of Book History and Digital Initiatives at the American Antiquarian Society, USA. His work investigates the history and future of the book, reading and writing, digital publishing, and cultural theory and rhetorics. He is the Founding Editor of the open access journal Textshop Experiments.
