Censorship in Polish Art After 1989 is a pioneering work on censorship in Polish art after the fall of the USSR available in English for the first time with a skilled translation by Lukasz Mojsak. Polish Art Historian Jakub Dabrowski, with contributions from Anna Demenko, offers the first comprehensive study to analyze the problems of restricting the freedom of artistic expression in the Third Polish Republic. The book includes two complementary approaches - legal and historical (including political and social aspects of the phenomenon). Based on the collected factographic material, Dabrowski captures the characteristic qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the phenomenon studied in time. He enters his considerations in a wider social, political, artistic and media context, at the same time pointing to symbolic breakthroughs, precedents, sequences or correlations of events.

This is a comprehensive overview of contemporary European theatre and performance as it enters the third decade of the twenty-first century. It combines critical discussions of key concepts, practitioners, and trends within theatre-making, both in particular countries and across borders, that are shaping European stage practice. With the geography, geopolitics, and cultural politics of Europe more unsettled than at any point in recent memory, this book’s combination of national and thematic coverage offers a balanced understanding of the continent’s theatre and performance cultures. Employing a range of methodologies and critical approaches across its three parts and ninety-four chapters, this book’s first part contains a comprehensive listing of European nations, the second part charts responses to thematic complexes that define current European performance, and the third section gathers a series of case studies that explore the contribution of some of Europe’s foremost theatre makers. Rather than rehearsing rote knowledge, this is a collection of carefully curated, interpretive accounts from an international roster of scholars and practitioners. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary European Theatre and Performance gives undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and practitioners an indispensable reference resource that can be used broadly across curricula.

This book is devoted to the concept of horizontal art history—a proposal of a paradigm shift formulated by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski (1952–2015)—that aims at undermining the hegemony of the discourse of art history created in the Western world. The concept of horizontal art history is one of many ideas on how to conduct nonhierarchical art historical analysis that have been developed in different geopolitical locations since at least the 1970s, parallel to the ongoing process of decolonization. This book is a critical examination of horizontal art history which provokes a discussion on the original concept of horizontal art history and possible methods to extend it. This is an edited volume written by international scholars who acknowledge the importance of the concept, share its basic assumptions and are aware both of its advantages and limitations. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art historiography and postcolonial studies.

Art in the Postmodern Era examines how artists and intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe got involved in debating postmodernism and how this postmodern in turn impacted the way of thinking about art in Central Europe. The book starts with a brief survey of 20th-century art and then focuses on the neo-avant-garde and the birth of postmodern art, with its democratization and subsequent shift towards a post-artistic epoch when anything can become art. The book also raises an important issue concerning art in the time of globalization. (Series: Development in Humanities - Vol. 3)

After '89 takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of theatre makers that have flaunted cultural commonplaces and begged new questions of Polish culture. Lease argues that the most significant change in performance practice after 1989 has been from opposition to the state to a more pluralistic practice that engages with marginalized identities purposefully left out of the rhetoric of freedom and independence.

Museums and Centers of Contemporary Art in Central Europe is a comprehensive study of the ecosystem of art museums and centers in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Focusing on institutions founded after 1989, the book analyses a thirty-year boom in art exhibition space in these regions, as well as a range of socio-political influences and curatorial debates that had a significant impact upon their development. Tracing the inspiration for the increase in art institutions and the models upon which these new spaces were based, Jagodzińska offers a unique insight into the history of museums in Central Europe. Providing analysis of a range of issues, including private and public patronage, architecture, and changing visions of national museums of art, the book situates these newly-founded institutions within their historical, political and museological contexts. Considering whether - and in what ways - they can be said to have a shared regional identity that is distinct from institutions elsewhere, this valuable contribution paints a picture of the region in its entirety from the perspective of new institutions of art. Offering the first comprehensive study on the topic, Museums and Centers of Contemporary Art in Central Europe should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of museums, art, history and architecture.

This collection of essays and reviews represents the most significant and comprehensive writing on Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. Miola's edited work also features a comprehensive critical history, coupled with a full bibliography and photographs of major productions of the play from around the world. In the collection, there are five previously unpublished essays. The topics covered in these new essays are women in the play, the play's debt to contemporary theater, its critical and performance histories in Germany and Japan, the metrical variety of the play, and the distinctly modern perspective on the play as containing dark and disturbing elements. To compliment these new essays, the collection features significant scholarship and commentary on The Comedy of Errors that is published in obscure and difficulty accessible journals, newspapers, and other sources. This collection brings together these essays for the first time.

In Gratitude for All the Gifts explores the literary and cultural links between the bestselling, Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the preeminent Eastern European poets of the twentieth century, including fellow Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Magdalena Kay opens new ground in comparative literary studies with her close analysis of Heaney's poetic work from the perspective of the English-speaking West's attraction, and especially Heane''s own attraction, to Eastern European poetry. While placing Milosz and Herbert in their cultural contexts and keeping an eye on the poems in their original Polish, this innovative and energetic study focuses on how Heaney encountered their work in translation. In Gratitude for All the Gifts thus allows us to see what happens when poetic forms, histories, and themes travel between countries and encourages us to understand cultural crossing not just thematically, but also in terms of form, voice, and aesthetic intent.

This book studies the influence of censorship on the selection and translation of English language fiction in the People’s Republic of Poland, 1944-1989. It analyses the differences between originals and their translations, taking into account the available archival evidence from the files of Poland’s Censorship Office, as well as the wider social and historical context. The book examines institutional censorship, self-censorship and such issues as national quotas of foreign literature, the varying severity of the regime, and criticism as a means to control literature. However, the emphasis remains firmly on how censorship affected the practice of translation. Translators shaped Polish perceptions of foreign literature from Charlie Chan books to Ulysses and from The Wizard of Oz to Moby-Dick. But whether translators conformed or rebelled, they were joined in this enterprise by censors and pulled into post-war Poland’s cultural power structures.

The Polish Complex takes place on Christmas Eve, from early morning until late in the evening, as a line of people (including the narrator, whose name is Konwicki) stand and wait in front of a jewelry store in Warsaw. Through the narrator we are told of what happens among those standing in line outside this store, what happens as the narrator's mind thinks and rants about the current state of Poland, and what happens as he imagines the failed Polish rebellion of 1863. The novel's form allows Konwicki (both character and author) to roam around and through Poland's past and present, and to range freely through whatever comes to his attention. By turns comic, lyrical, despairing, and liberating, The Polish Complex stands as one of the most important novels to have come out of Poland since World War II.