Coming Of Age Under Martial Law

How do historical cataclysms affect the social conditioning of young people? How do individuals born in the same period come to form an identifiable "generation"? How do coming-of-age stories create a sense of community and generational identity? Coming of Age under Martial Law: The Initiation Novels of Poland's Last Communist Generation addresses these questions, examining a selection of post-1989 coming-of-age novels authored by the generation of Polish writers whose transition from adolescence to adulthood coincided with Poland's transition from communism to liberal democracy.BR> Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova argues that when cataclysms of any nature overlap with the sensitive period of maturation into adulthood, they disrupt the natural rhythm of society's self-renewal. In the case of the Polish '89ers, the generational clash with their predecessors did not produce the anticipated generational change in leadership, but a pathological role reversal: the elders refused to give up their leadership positions, while the young were stifled in their development and occupied marginal social spaces. This social imbalance is profoundlly reflected in the content and themes of the novels produced by this younger generation, as the author shows. Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova is an assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas.

The world is spinning around us and we are spinning with it. When changes occur at the geopolitical level, inevitable changes also occur in people’s identity and in the way they see and represent the world. This book looks at this world with new eyes, approaching contemporary history (and herstory) from a scholarly perspective that cancels borders. Emphasis here is laid on migration, geopolitics, global citizenship, human rights, the EU and the non-EU, and East and West, as represented in fiction and drama or translated on television. The first part of the volume deals with migration and alterations in the non-Western world, with constant references to September 11, terrorism and wars, and the Syrian refugee crisis, before the focus moves on to one of the most important migration hosts nowadays, the European Union, discussing its expansion to the East, French President Macron’s call for renewal, and, lastly, a possible beginning of the end, announced by Brexit. This volume is a mirror of the discourses of globalization, one that makes the old self-other dichotomy obsolete. We are all selves in the eye of the storm that is raving around us, bringing change with it.

Examines the 1980 Solidarity revolution in Poland, the government's subsequent establishment of martial law in response, in 1981, and the eventual transition to democracy in 1989.

Offers a complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism under the fascist government of wartime Croatia.

Examines the ideology of sacrifice in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, analyzing a range of fictional and real-life figures who became part of a pantheon of heroes primarily because of their victimhood.

Deciphers typical social practices as a hidden language of communication in urban plebeian society

Interweaves Eastern European postwar history, dissidence, and literature to expand our understanding of the significance of this important Lithuanian writer.

Charts the resettlement of the Ukrainian capital after Nazi occupation and the returning Soviet rulers' efforts to retain political legitimacy.