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The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to
articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about
communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and
also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching
communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations,
as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation,
upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon. The
authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic
categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet
colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism.
Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project
doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays
show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also
a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely
attempted to build a better world for themselves. The book is
interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history,
intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology,
literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a
nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.
This anthology presents a selection of texts on Polish socialist
realist literature, written from the early 1980s to date. They
depict a comprehensive picture of this literary phenomenon:
starting from its holistic interpretations, through detailed
analyses of the poetics of literary and political texts and a
presentation of specific, also untypical embodiments of this
artistic doctrine, to descriptions of the functioning of the
institutions of literary life under socialist realism. All the
texts in this anthology share a historically and culturally
determined general methodological perspective, representing a
combination of the Polish version of structuralism in literary
studies - on the descriptive plane - with the anti-communist
attitude on the plane of evaluation of presented phenomena.
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