Trans-Dialogues: Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Legacy to Contemporary Polish Literature

Abstract

This chapter addresses the role Virginia Woolf plays in contemporary Polish literature, examining the significance of her modernist legacy – as a vital part of planetary feminism – to Polish feminist fiction. Though Woolf entered Polish culture in the 1920s and her hybrid fictional forms were translated in the 1950-60s, her reception was delayed. Feminist rewritings of Woolf’s oeuvre began to emerge after the first Polish translations of Orlando (1994) and A Room of One’s Own (1997), followed by her auto/biographical writings. Polish writers – Joanna Bator, Sylwia Chutnik, Marta Konarzewska, Renata Lis, Izabela Morska, Maria Nurowska, and Olga Tokarczuk – transform, rewrite and re-use Woolf’s works in Central European cultural contexts. The most visible signs of Woolf’s ‘afterlives’ are transtextual relations between contemporary fiction, biographies of Woolf and her oeuvre. This chapter explores biofiction with Woolfian themes and intertextual echoes that enhance polyphonic effects. It also focuses on hypertextuality by analysing the functions of Woolfian hypotexts, for instance, tracing back the generic fusing of the Nobel Prize Laureate Tokarczuk’s ‘constellation novels’ to Woolf’s hybrid fictional forms. The chapter applies Jessica Berman’s ‘trans critical optic’ that allows to read Polish textual dialogues with Woolf from transdisciplinary, transnational and transgender perspectives.