Tab Article

The History of Polish Literature presents the chronicle of a fertile literature long neglected by the English-speaking world. Professor Milosz [winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980] includes literature from every age, from medieval Latin poems to the experimental poetry today. For this edition he has updated the information and brought the discussion into the present with a new epilogue.
This textbook does what all such should do, but which most do not, inspires the reader to further study of the subject.
Reviewer: William L. Harwood from Washington, DC USA This volume became the standard text of Polish literary history in English when first published in 1984 because it was the only modern one and written by the leading western expert on the topic. I used it in a Polish literary history survey course and compared it with the standard Polish texts of that era of less than free expression in Poland. While necessarily not as encyclopedic as the books from Warsaw or Krakow, it covered the highlights, and there are many of them, of the entire sweep of the topic, including a section on himself. It is still the standard in English. There may be something from the new Poland that supersedes it, but I don't know. It is vital for understanding the rich tradition of literature in Polish that has always been treated on the margins of world literature. For example, it helps to put Chopin's Ballades into perspective and enrich one's understanding of his intellectual milieu before he left Warsaw to join the Polish emigration-and Milosz covers that as well. Buy it.