Mapping Experience in Polish and Russian Women’s Writing

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.