ABSTRACT

Family and Artistic Relations in Polish Women’s Autobiographical Literature examines women’s autobiographical works published in Poland after the year 2000 in a broader cultural context. This volume focuses on the writers’ representation of their relationships with their mothers – many of them traumatized survivors of historical cataclysms, many of them professional artists, many of them struggling to reconcile their creative work with their role as wife and mother. Grzemska sheds light not only on the literary strategies used by the memoirists, but she also helps us understand women’s struggles for an independent voice, for new models of commemoration, for healing. This book will interest readers in literary and cultural studies, as well as anyone who wishes to better understand Poland’s cultural transformations in the post-Communist era.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

Being in charge of autobiography

chapter 1|27 pages

Glorification and reckoning

chapter 3|24 pages

Blood ties, blood bonds

chapter 4|17 pages

Mothers, daughters and their shame

chapter 5|27 pages

Topologies of illness

chapter |10 pages

Epilogue

Aesthetics of autobiographical hybrids