Customer Reviews

The History of Polish Literature, Updated edition

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This volume became the standard text of Polish literary history in English when first published in 1984 because it was the only modern one and written by the leading western expert on the topic. I used it in a Polish literary history survey course and compared it with the standard Polish texts of that era of less than free expression in Poland. While necessarily not as encyclopedic as the books from Warsaw or Krakow, it covered the highlights, and there are many of them, of the entire sweep of the topic, including a section on himself. It is still the standard in English. There may be something from the new Poland that supersedes it, but I don't know. It is vital for understanding the rich tradition of literature in Polish that has always been treated on the margins of world literature. For example, it helps to put Chopin's Ballades into perspective and enrich one's understanding of his intellectual milieu before he left Warsaw to join the Polish emigration--and Milosz covers that as well. Buy it.