University of Rochester Press Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation (Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe)

Review 2016 Outstanding Academic Title ― .[An] engaging study of coming-of-age novels by Polish authors born between 1960 and 1975 . This compelling study and its findings will interest Slavists and Polonists alike, as well as scholars in gender studies, childhood studies, children's and Young Adult literature, comparative literature, and post-Communist studies. SLAVIC AND EASTERN EUROPEAN JOURNAL Vassileva-Karagyozova takes into consideration aspects of gender, postcolonial literary theory, anthropology, sociology and psychology and draws a convincing picture of a society in transition and its generational struggles. ― SLAVIC REVIEWBrilliantly reversing the traditional inquiry--how do generations shape literature?--Vassileva-Karagyozova asks: 'How do [works] shape 'the identity of Poland's last communist generation'?' . . . This is a much-needed addition to the scholarship on cultural work in Poland, as it overthrew the chains of communism and moved toward democracy and freedom. In sum, this is a brilliant work by an original and perceptive scholar. Essential. ― CHOICE Product Description 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, while the 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. About the Author Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas.