Between Young Poland, Skamander and the Avant-garde. Women Writing Poetry in Interwar Poland
Authors: Zawiszewska-Semeniuk Agata 
Published: October 2024

This monograph focuses on Polish female poets whose low-quality artistic output has resulted in their names being either relegated to the margins of Polish bibliographies, literary encyclopaedias, and university course books, or eliminated from these sources altogether.
The inspiration for the analysis comes from two sources. One is the essay by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One&rsquo;s Own (1929), while the other is the work of Polish researchers and feminist critics who study female poets of the interwar period, including Grażyna Borkowska, Małgorzata Czermińska, Michał Głowiński, Inga Iwasi&oacute;w, Krystyna Kłosińska, Joanna Krajewska, Ewa Kraskowska, Anna Legeżyńska, Lucyna Marzec, Ursula Phillips, and Janusz Sławiński.
Research on female lyric poetry from 1918 to 1939 has been conducted through the lens of modern feminist criticism. This perspective highlights that the effort to uncover gaps in the history of literature and to reclaim the names and works of forgotten women writers does not necessarily result in the discovery of new territories or geniuses. Furthermore, it does not have to culminate in the construction of a new canon intended to compete with the existing one. It aims to broaden, deepen, and nuance the understanding of the social roots of literature, the mechanisms that govern literary life, the dynamics of reception, and the processes of creating a canon. Therefore, the approach to female poetry presented in this book can be situated within the cultural sociology of literature, which connects traditional theories of reception and influence with a modern perspective on the literary text. This perspective views the literary text as a keystone in the processes and relationships between institutions, economic operators, material and symbolic capital, and communities, including literary academies, festivals, printing houses, literary salons, and the social relations between writers, critics, and consumers of culture.
Primary sources originate from the most significant compendia of Polish literary studies, inter-war poetry anthologies, and literary periodicals. The corpus of collected biographical notes and texts comprises approximately 50 female poets and 150 small volumes of poetry. Considering the calculations of inter-war poetry researchers, who indicate that around 100 small volumes were published annually, with about 10 percent authored by women, one can assume that this corpus is representative.
The book is divided into eight chapters, each of which can be treated as a separate synthesis of the following topics: the history of the concept of women&rsquo;s literature (Chapter I: Literature by Women &ndash; Women&rsquo;s Literature), the political and social context of literature written by women in the first decades of the 20th century (Chapter II: Women and Literature in Interwar Poland), and the ways female poets functioned in collective works, including anthologies (Chapter III: Women Poets in Anthologies) and in poetry collections (Chapters IV&ndash;VII). The last chapter, a coda, discusses the theme of motherhood in interwar poetry written by women.
Translated by Joanna Witkowska