Między Młodą Polską, Skamandrem i Awangarda. Kobiety piszące wiersze w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym

Data udostępnienia wersji cyfrowej na licencji CC-BY-SA: maj 2024

Materiały do publikacji zostały zebrane i opracowane w ramach grantu MNiSW (N103 003 31/0105) Gatunek – Kanon – Polityka. Historia i genologia pisarstwa kobiecego w XX wieku

The monograph is about Polish female poets whose low quality of artistic output resulted in their names being either in the margins of Polish bibliographies, literary encyclopedias and university course books or were eliminated from these sources altogether.

The inspiration for the analysis comes from two sources. One of them is the essay by Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own (1929) in which the classic writer of Western feminist criticism reflects on the reasons why women of the Elizabethan era did not write while most men could write a sonnet. Another source are the works of Polish interwar period researchers as well as feminist critics, among others Grażyna Borkowska, Małgorzata Czermińska, Michał Głowiński, Inga Iwasiów, Krystyna Kłosińskia, Joanna Krajewska, Ewa Kraskowska, Anna Legeżyńska, Lucyna Marzec, Ursula Phillips and Janusz Sławiński.

The research on the female lyric poetry of 1918-1939 has been carried out from the point of view of modern feminist criticism which points out that the interest in discovering gaps on the map of the history of literature and reclaiming the names and the output of forgotten women writers do not have to lead to the discovery of new lands and geniuses, nor does it have to lead to the construction of a new canon that would aspire to compete with the already existing canon. It serves, however, the purpose of showing the obliterated traces of female participation in culture and breaking the silence of women in order to fill the gaps in the historical knowledge and create a canon of culture that would include not only one but two genders. It then aims at broadening, deepening and nuancing the knowledge about social roots of literature, the mechanisms that rule the literary life, the dynamics of reception and the processes of creating a canon. The approach to female poetry presented in the book can thus be situated within cultural sociology of literature which connects the traditional theory of reception and influence with the modern outlook on the literary text as a keystone of the processes and relations between institutions, economic operators, material and symbolic capital, communities of people and knowledge base, e.g. literary academies, festivals, printing houses, literary salons, social relations between writers, critics and consumers of culture.

Primary sources come from the most important compendia of Polish literary studies, inter-war poetry anthologies and literary periodicals. The corpus of thus collected biograms and texts amounts to about 50 female poets and 150 small volumes of poetry. Taking into consideration the calculations of the inter-war poetry researchers who point out that about 100 small volumes appeared yearly and about 10 percent of them were written by women, one can assume that this corpus is representative.

The book is divided into seven chapters and each of them can be treated as a separate synthesis of the following problems: the history of the concept of women’s literature (Chapter I: The literature of women – women’s literature), the political and social context of literature written by women in the first decades of the 20th century (Chapter II: Literature and women in the inter-war period), the ways of functioning of female poets in collective works (Chapter IV: Female poets in the shadow of Young Poland, Skamander and Avant-garde, Chapter V: Female poets in poetic groups – Skamander, Chapter VI: Female poets in poetic groups – Kwadryga [Quadriga], Chapter VII: Parnassian Zuzanna Rabska).

Translated by Joanna Witkowska