ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner, 2023 Comics Studies Society Charles Hatfield Book Prize

Comics and Nation offers a fresh perspective on the role of popular culture in the one-hundred-year history of the Polish state, from its foundation in 1918 to the present. Drawing on dozens of press articles, interviews, and readers’ letters, Ewa Stańczyk discusses how journalists, artists, and audiences used comics to probe the boundaries of national culture and scrutinize the established notions of Polishness. Critical moments of Poland’s political transformation ––the establishment of the interwar Polish Republic, the Cold War, the liberalization of the 1970s, the 1989 democratic transition, the turn to memory politics in the 2000s––have all been reflected in the history of Polish comics. Stańczyk offers new insights into how the production of homegrown comics and the influx of foreign works enabled commentators to express their fears, hopes, and disillusionment with political, economic, and cultural changes in Poland and beyond. At its core, Comics and Nation rethinks the impact of popular culture and transnational exchange on Polish nation building, citizenship formation, and the legitimation of power.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ewa Stańczyk is Senior Lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Commemorating the Children of World War II in Poland: Combative Remembrance.

REVIEWS

“Comics and Nation is … an important work, presenting a new and unique way of considering how the history of Polish comics can be perceived and conceptualized. It should serve as a formative text that will inspire further research into the complex structure of relations influencing graphic storytelling in Poland and other Eastern and Central European countries.” —M. Jutkiewicz, Slavonic and Eastern European Review

“Comics and Nation is an important resource, being a rare survey of the comics scene in an Eastern European locale, written in English. The book is packed with historical rundowns, quoted material from seldom heard-from Polish scholars and critics, and enjoyable side stories.” — John A. Lent, International Journal of Comic Art Blog

“Through an ethic of multiplicity, Stańczyk nuances major world events through the issues of translation and cultural studies, making this book one of interest to scholars across the humanities … Compelling and thoroughly researched.” —Ashley Ecklund, ImageTexT

“Stańczyk constructs her analysis around the influences that Western comics, Americanization, and anti-Americanism had on the development and transformation of Polish comic book culture and national identity. The result is a well-researched synthesis of comics studies and national history, grounded in transnational influence on Polish comics and on the state itself as it evolved from republic to Soviet-style Communism to post-Soviet market economy.” —Sean Eedy, Canadian Slavonic Papers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 Comics in Interwar Poland: Between Homegrown Stories and Foreign Imports

Chapter 2 The (Anti-)American Dream: Comics in Public Debates in the 1950s

Chapter 3 “Polish Europeans”: The Opening of the 1970s

Chapter 4 The Foreign Invasion: Comics and the Free-Market Economy in the 1990s

Chapter 5 Comics after 2000: Between Individual and Collective Memory

Conclusion