Vart går den polska litteraturen? : Några nedslag i nutida litterära trender.

M. Anna Packalén Parkman Department of Modern Languages, Uppsala University anna.packalen@moderna.uu.se Abstract. Whither Polish literature? Some Observations on Contemporary Literary Trends During the past decade, Polish women writers have published a variety of titles which are symptomatic of the ‘new times’ and fashionable literary trends. The most prominent examples include not only texts which can be broadly defined as ‘queer writing’ (e.g. novels by Ewa Schilling and Marta Dzido), but also works which are associated with pop culture and have been defined outside of Poland as ‘chick lit. I would argue that various novels authored by Katarzyna Grochola, who has famously been called the ‘Polish Bridget Jones’, belong to this category. Besides these two types of writing, there has also been a significant development within the genre of ‘erotic novels’ (e.g. Nielegalne związki (2010) by Grażyna Plebanek, as well as other new novels such as Rdza (2008) by Ewa Berent and Naga (2010) by Izabela Szolc.) All these novels are quite diverse, and they all transgress the conventional way of depicting heterosexual sex scenes and erotic encounters. They also address in new ways the modern woman’s search for identity in modern Poland. Of particular interest in this type of literature is its depiction of cultural diversity on the one hand, and its local context on the other. Thus, my primary concern in analysing this newly emerging type of women’s writing is with the following question: To what extent do these writers consciously imitate ‘Western European’ models, and to what extent do they create their own local genre by responding to the needs of a culture in which sexuality is no longer a taboo topic