Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation
Examines a selection of post-1989 coming-of-age novels authored by the generation of Polish writers whose transition from adolescence to adulthood coincided with Poland's transition from communism to liberal democracy.

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

This volume is a study of approximately thirty coming-of-age Polish novels written by the so-called '89ers — the generation who became adults just as Communist rule was ending. Narrating fictionalized childhoods in Poland in the 1970s and '80s and the transition to adulthood in the late '80s and early '90s, these novels depict the consequences of the fall of Communism for their protagonists' maturation process. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova argues that the liminal aspects of these narratives, in which the protagonists' rites of passage remain suspended in important ways, reflect the effects of the cataclysmic events of the late 1980s as well as the ways in which, for the Polish '89ers, the clash with their predecessors did not produce the anticipated generational change in leadership. Instead, the elders refused to give up their leadership positions, whilethe young were stifled in their development and occupied marginal social spaces. In Vassileva-Karagyozova's fascinating account, these novels illuminate the authors' attempts to define themselves as a generation as well as to narrate the sociocultural shift in democratic Poland from collectivism to Western-style individualism.

Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas.
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Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation
Examines a selection of post-1989 coming-of-age novels authored by the generation of Polish writers whose transition from adolescence to adulthood coincided with Poland's transition from communism to liberal democracy.

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

This volume is a study of approximately thirty coming-of-age Polish novels written by the so-called '89ers — the generation who became adults just as Communist rule was ending. Narrating fictionalized childhoods in Poland in the 1970s and '80s and the transition to adulthood in the late '80s and early '90s, these novels depict the consequences of the fall of Communism for their protagonists' maturation process. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova argues that the liminal aspects of these narratives, in which the protagonists' rites of passage remain suspended in important ways, reflect the effects of the cataclysmic events of the late 1980s as well as the ways in which, for the Polish '89ers, the clash with their predecessors did not produce the anticipated generational change in leadership. Instead, the elders refused to give up their leadership positions, whilethe young were stifled in their development and occupied marginal social spaces. In Vassileva-Karagyozova's fascinating account, these novels illuminate the authors' attempts to define themselves as a generation as well as to narrate the sociocultural shift in democratic Poland from collectivism to Western-style individualism.

Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas.
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Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation

Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation

by Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova
Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation

Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation

by Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova

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Overview

Examines a selection of post-1989 coming-of-age novels authored by the generation of Polish writers whose transition from adolescence to adulthood coincided with Poland's transition from communism to liberal democracy.

2016 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

This volume is a study of approximately thirty coming-of-age Polish novels written by the so-called '89ers — the generation who became adults just as Communist rule was ending. Narrating fictionalized childhoods in Poland in the 1970s and '80s and the transition to adulthood in the late '80s and early '90s, these novels depict the consequences of the fall of Communism for their protagonists' maturation process. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova argues that the liminal aspects of these narratives, in which the protagonists' rites of passage remain suspended in important ways, reflect the effects of the cataclysmic events of the late 1980s as well as the ways in which, for the Polish '89ers, the clash with their predecessors did not produce the anticipated generational change in leadership. Instead, the elders refused to give up their leadership positions, whilethe young were stifled in their development and occupied marginal social spaces. In Vassileva-Karagyozova's fascinating account, these novels illuminate the authors' attempts to define themselves as a generation as well as to narrate the sociocultural shift in democratic Poland from collectivism to Western-style individualism.

Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781580465281
Publisher: BOYDELL & BREWER INC
Publication date: 08/15/2015
Series: ISSN , #13
Pages: 232
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

1 The Displaced Generation of the Children of Martial Law 14

2 Arrested Maturation 40

3 Emasculated Men, Absent Fathers 62

4 Exorcising Mother-Demons: The Myth of the Polish Mother Revisited 99

5 At the Roots of Apostasy 131

Conclusion: Kitschy Parents, Barbaric Children 163

Notes 167

Bibliography 199

Index 213

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