This monograph is a long-awaited, comprehensive and thorough study filling the research gap concerning translation and censorship in the context of the Polish People’s Republic (1944–1989). Its main objective is to show how censorship influenced the production and translation of English-language fiction in communist Poland, studying a wide variety of literary genres from the “progressive” novel (see below) through the classics to children’s literature. The investigation is carried out not only by comparing renditions with their source texts and analysing paratextual material but also by using archival evidence available from the Central Archive of Modern Records (Archiwum Akt Nowych) in Warsaw, which has on file records documenting censors’ work. Thus the book goes beyond narrowly understood perspectives of literary criticism and text analysis to embed the discussion in a wider socio-historical context.

References

Bates, John

2011 “Censoring English Literature in People’s Poland, 1948–1967.” In Censorship Across Borders: The Reception of English Literature in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. by Catherine O’Leary, and Alberto Lázaro, 59–72. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

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2009 The Translated Child: Children’s Literature in Translation in Communist and Post-Communist Poland. PhD diss. University of Alberta.

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1956 The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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