New Perspectives in Polish Culture: Personal Encounters, Public Affairs collects essays that examine the public-private dynamic as Polish culture-from the nineteenth century to the present day-interacts with the tensions, ambiguities, and idiosyncrasies of European modernity. The authors of these essays discuss Polish poetry, fiction, theatre, and literary and cultural theory. Writers and artists discussed in these essays range from Adam Mickiewicz and Joseph Conrad through Witold Gombrowicz, Miron Bialoszewski, Czeslaw Milosz, Zofia Nalkowska, and Tadeusz Kantor to Slawomir Mrożek, Tadeusz Rożewicz, the poets of bruLion, and the latest dramatists, as well as many other authors active both in Poland itself and in the Polish diaspora.

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.

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.

Serves as an introduction to contemporary Polish literature, developed through critical discussion of key problems and representative writers. It includes poetry, fiction and drama. Some essays are devoted to individual writers including, Milosz, Herbert, Gombrowicz, Schulz, Konwicki and Mrozek.

From 1942 to 1950, nearly twenty thousand Poles found refuge from the horrors of war-torn Europe in camps within Britain’s African colonies, including Uganda, Tanganyika, Kenya and Northern and Southern Rhodesia. On the Edges of Whiteness tells their improbable story, tracing the manifold, complex relationships that developed among refugees, their British administrators, and their African neighbors. While intervening in key historical debates across academic disciplines, this book also gives an accessible and memorable account of survival and dramatic cultural dislocation against the backdrop of global conflict.

What makes countries rich? What makes countries poor? Europe's Growth Champion: Insights from the Economic Rise of Poland seeks to answer these questions, and many more, through a study of one of the biggest, and least heard about, economic success stories. Over the last twenty-five years Poland has transitioned from a perennially backward, poor, and peripheral country to unexpectedly join the ranks of the world's high income countries. Europe's Growth Champion is about the lessons learned from Poland's remarkable experience, the conditions that keep countries poor, and the challenges that countries need to face in order to grow. It defines a new growth model that Poland and its Eastern European peers need to adopt to grow and catch up with their Western counterparts. Poland's economic rise emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth- institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders- in economic development. It demonstrates that a shift from an extractive society, where the few rule for the benefit of the few, to an inclusive society, where many rule for the benefit of many, can be the key to economic success. *IEurope's Growth Champion asserts that a newly emerged inclusive society will support further convergence of Poland and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe with the West, and help to sustain the region's Golden Age. It also acknowledges the future challenges that Poland faces, and that moving to the core of the European economy will require further reforms and changes in Poland's developmental character.

This edited collection provides a state-of-the art overview of research on willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second and foreign language. In particular, it includes innovative studies seeking to demonstrate the ways in which WTC can be examined within the framework of complex dynamic systems, how the construct is related to self-assessment, reticence and extroversion, and what is signifies in the case of immigrants. Another group of papers is related to the role of technology in fostering WTC in different contexts. The volume also comprises papers that touch on methodological issues in the study of WTC such as experience case sampling, the network approach or the integration of the macro- and micro-perspective. The book will be of values to researchers interested in the study of WTC but will also provide inspiration for students, teachers and materials writers.

This volume is made up of essays first presented as papers at the conference held in May 2015 at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. It is divided into two sections. The first deals with museological questions--the voices of the curators, comments on the POLIN museum exhibitions and projects, and discussions on Jewish museums and education. The second examines the current state of the historiography of the Jews on the Polish lands from the first Jewish settlement to the present day. Making use of the leading scholars in the field from Poland, Eastern and Western Europe, North America, and Israel, the volume provides a definitive overview of the history and culture of one of the most important communities in the long history of the Jewish people.

Poland in the Modern World presents a history of the country from the late nineteenth century to the present, incorporating new perspectives from social and cultural history and positioning it in a broad global context Challenges traditional accounts Poland that tend to focus on national, political history, emphasizing the country's 'exceptionalism'. Presents a lively, multi-dimensional story, balancing coverage of high politics with discussion of social, cultural and economic changes, and their effects on individuals’ daily lives. Explores both the regional diversity within Poland and the country’s place within Europe and the wider world. Provides a new interpretive framework for understanding key historical events in Poland’s modern history, including the experiences of World War II and the postwar communist era.