The idea of this book is to add new chapter to the works and essays of
modern and contemporary literature, presenting growing interest in problems
of history presentation. The twentieth century brought great changes in the
understanding and the perception of the history, which inspired the authors
to recognize how the history has been presented by selected works of Polish
literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and especially what are
differences in point of view, mood of presentation or writer’s strategic targets.
This book is a successful illustration of the process in which the great historical
relation has been changed from the domain of collective into polymorphic
stream with many individual centres. The authors compare the selected examples
of the historical events and processes, presented in different ontological,
axiological and epistolary aspects.
The book consists of three parts: testimonies, mediatisation and exploration.
Aleksandra Dębska-Kossakowska shows in the first part the textual tracks
of the history from the point of view of the individual experience, based on
the selected diaries of A. Bobkowski, J. Czapski, and G. Herling-Grudziński.
The subject of the analysis relates to the historical moment of the destruction
of the European culture after the World War II.
In the second part, Beata Gontarz assesses the presence of the history in
the novelistic fiction, using as an example the selected novels by P. Szewc,
H. Waniek, and P. Czakański. Their oeure allows to put forward the thesis
about the implicit features of the history presentation.
The subject of Monika Wiszniowska’s deliberation in the part three are
the contemporary relations in the genre of reportage. This domain of prose
becomes now the important field of the meeting between scientific historical
discourse and the reconstruction of the past reality by literature. The books
by such authors as H. Krall, M. Szejnert, W. Jagielski, W. Tochman and
W. Nowak introduce us in the world of variety of experience, understanding
and meaning of the history
