A Time for the Province: Palimpsests and Borders in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature

Within discourses on Polish provincial or marginal literature, the eastern borderlands are a richly symbolic region that inspires much fascination and study. Through close readings, surveys, and analyses of transborder narratives by seven modern writers who hailed from the Polish borderlands or set their works there, A Time for the Province demonstrates how the region has come to represent a palimpsest of cultural identities and myths as each new generation unearths and rediscovers them. George Gasyna explores and theorizes the province as a space of grand utopian visions and dystopic gestures about both the Polish past and a Polish future. Offering a novel literary and cultural history of modern Polish writing, he paves the way toward productive new modes of conceptualizing the cultural and literary forms that have come from Central Europe over the last century, challenging many basic assumptions about what this literature can offer its readership in Poland and around the world. Through engagement with the theoretical apparatuses of postmemory studies and border studies, A Time for the Province redefines Polish cultural identity in the current moment of postsocialist transition and globalized citizenship.