Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator as a (hi)story of the peripheral European city of Wałbrzych/Waldenburg
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21189614 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska (0000-0003-4739-5591, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 330-343 |
| Publication date | 2021-05-04 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17449855.2021.1921958 |
| OpenAlex | W3161391143 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
This article discusses Wałbrzych (in German, Waldenburg), a city located in Poland, ten kilometres away from the Czech Republic, as a peripheral space within a national and neo-liberal narrative. It looks into the way Joanna Bator’s novel Dark, Almost Night (2012) describes Wałbrzych for her readers, as she conjures up a paradoxical image of a place whose complex past challenges a homogenous vision of the Polish national identity and national history, but which, at the same time, remains deeply anti-liberal, economically backward, and dependent on the country’s economic centre – represented in the novel by Warsaw. It is argued that such discrepancies reflect the subversive status of Poland’s western peripheries as undermining both the foundational myth of the Polish post-war state (1947–89) and the success narrative of the Polish neo-liberal transformation
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Economic history · German · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · National identity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Central European Literary Studies · Classics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|