The Short Story in a Polish Context: Classic Short Fiction from the Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries edited and with Commentary by Oscar E. Swan
“The selection of the short stories is wide-ranging historically and thematically. In this way, The Short Story in a Polish Context presents a personal, yet fairly exhaustive, account of the Polish short-story tradition through the centuries.” — Agnieszka Jezyk, University of Washington
“The editor has my congratulations for making an important element of Polish cultural production—the short tale and its various sub-genres—accessible to students of Polish literature and language and to general readers.” — George Gasyna, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
An anthology that shows how the short-fiction genre evolved in Poland; The Short Story in a Polish Context contains selections belonging to the Polish short-story canon throughout the ages. A variety of Poland’s greatest and best-known authors and interesting themes have been chosen. Several of the stories appear here in English for the first time in Oscar Swan’s masterful translations; others have been translated by other well-known literary translators of Polish. Prof. Swan’s commentaries on the stories give the reader historical context as well as providing insight into linguistic and cultural aspects that might otherwise elude the non-Polish-speaking reader. Appropriate for use as a text in a Polish literature-in-translation course, the book can also serve as a supplementary text for courses on Central European culture or simply as an introduction to Polish culture for the general reader.
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About the Editor: Oscar E. Swan is professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has been teaching since 1974. He specializes in Polish language, literature, and culture as well as Polish cinema. He is the author of many textbooks and reference books for Polish-language learners, several translations from Polish, and scholarly monographs and articles about Slavic languages and literatures.
