Central European Contributions

This section covers scholarship published in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia from 2002 through 2004. We acknowledge with gratitude the cooperation of Raili Põldsaar and Irina Novikova, who provided the refereed material from Estonia and Latvia, respectively. The material with English summaries of studies in Czech and Slovakian was procured through the generous cooperation of Jaroslav Kušnír of the University of Prešov, Slovakia.

a. General: Literary History, Cultural History, Bibliography, Autobiography, Interviews

The years 2003 and 2004 brought two long-awaited histories in Poland. Volumes 1 and 2 of Historia literatury amerykanskiej XX wieku, ed. Agnieszka Salska (Kraków: Universitas, 2003), offer an account of the principal developments in the history of 20th-century American literature. The chapters, authored for the most part by leading Polish scholars in the field, are uneven in quality. Some are mere encyclopedic narratives; others offer interesting, occasionally brilliant discussions, often based on the authors' own scholarship. Such is the case with Zbigniew Maszewski's chapter on William Faulkner (1:467–84), Krzysztof Andrzejczak's on self-referential fiction of the late 20th century (2:523–45), Jerzy Durczak's on autobiography (2:563–72), and two of Salska's essays on poetry (1:75–88, 89–114). Marek Wilczynski owns some of the best-written and, arguably, controversial essays in Historia. His contributions, ending each major period section, map out the development of literary theory and criticism from Edgar Allan Poe's Philosophy of Composition (1:143–52) through the advent of the theory of national literature (1:357–79), settling at long last on discussions about the canon of American literature (1:611–43, 2:505–19, 741–50). Wilczynski has no sympathy for various attempts to revise the canon as launched in F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance. He is especially harsh toward feminists, whom he blames for having "ideologized a major part of literary research; its truce with the politics [was] increasingly evident in the decades closing [the 20th] century" (2:519—editors' translation). In vain would the reader attempt to find out on what grounds Wilczynski bases his pessimistic view: the bibliography for the chapter does not contain a single feminist critique. Nor will it be evident to the Polish reader how the feminists' "revisionist" politics led to the questionings of the canon from the late 1960s to the end of the 20th century.

Wilczyński's conservative stand is not fortuitous in Salska's book. In the introduction the editor of Historia comments: "The present work which we put forward to the Polish reader is a result of a compromise of a conservative bent" (1:10—editors' translation). This is understandable. However, there are troubling elements in Historia, such as the use of colonial discourse in reference to racial and ethnic minorities, or Jadwiga Maszewska's blunder in claiming that Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl evidences the author's fascination with Catholicism (1:183).

Marek Golebiowski's Dzieje kultury Stanów Zjednoczonych (Warsaw: PWN, 2004) competently executes what has not been attempted since the publication of Józef Chałasiński's Kultura amerykanska (1962), an exploration of most facets of American culture: architecture, graphic art, visual culture, sculpture, literature, music, theater, material culture, and science and technology. The book falls into three main parts. The assessment of the cultures of the "first Americans," both Native and African, argues Gołębiowski, constitutes the first part. The second part discusses the regions and the colonies, and the third looks at historical periods from the 1770s through the 1970s. Despite the publisher-enforced cuts in the material included, as Gołębiowski explains in the introduction, the book is very useful to the general reader and has been very well received in Poland.

Lectures on American Literature (Prague: Karolinum, 2002) is coauthored by Martin Procházka (beginnings to 1914), Justin Quinn (20th-century poetry), and Hana Ulmanová and Erik S. Robarack (20th-century American fiction). In many ways a helpful work (especially the really fine Procházka section), as a whole it is very...