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.
About the Author: Urszula Chowaniec: Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski Cracow Academy in Poland. She is also a researcher within international project at the University of Tampere, Finland: Body, Generation and Transformation: Polish and Russian Women's Writing (www.womenswriting.fi, 2007-2010), as well as the editor of the online cultural journal Women's Writing Online. She is an author of In Search of Woman: On the Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka (W poszukiwaniu kobiety. O wczesnych powiesciach Ireny Krzywickiej, 2007), she has co-edited Masquerade and Femininity. Essays on Polish and Russian Women Writers (with Marja Rytkonen and Ursula Phillips, Cambridge Scholar Publishing 2008). Kirsi Kurkijarvi: M.A. Doctoral student at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her main research interests are the Second World War, women's war writing, and gender and cultural studies. She is a joint editor of Women's Writing Online's first issue Poland Under Feminist Eyes (2009). Ursula Phillips: Ph.D. (Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, 2006). Since April 2007 Honorary Research Associate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She was a contributor to and joint editor with Knut Andreas Grimstad of Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose (University of Bergen, 2005); and joint author with Grazyna Borkowska and Malgorzata Czerminska of Pisarki polskie od sredniowiecza do wspolczesnosci (Gdansk 2000). Marja Rytkonen: Docent, Ph.D. Senior lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland, Department of Russian. Head of the project Polish and Russian Women's Writing in Transformation: Generation, National Identity and the Body (PURU) based at the University of Tampere, Department of Russian Language and Culture. Her publications include About the Self and Time: On Autobiographical Texts by E. Gershtein, T. Petkevich, E. Bonner, M. Plisetskaja and M. Arbatova (Tampere 2004). She was a contributor to and joint editor with Markku Lehtiniemi and Simo Leisti of Real Stories, Imagined Realities: Fictionality and Non-fictionality in Literary Constructs and Historical Contexts (Tampere 2007).