This study looks closely at the changes taking place in Polish literary scholarship at the turn of the century, and focuses on the work of the founder of Polish Formalism, Kazimierz Woycicki and the other main theoreticians and practitioners of this School. While presenting a comparative and contrasting approach to Polish and Russian Formalism, the study concentrates on how the ideas of the Russian Formalists were accepted and applied by the Polish School, which modified and transcended them. Special attention is paid to Woycicki's original definition of the subject of literary study. The two...

A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945-1960 examines the long-term impact of ethnic cleansing on postwar Poland, focusing on the western Polish provinces of Poznan and Zielona Gora. Employing archival materials from multiple sources, including newly available Secret Police archives, it demonstrates how ethnic cleansing solidified Communist rule in the short term while reshaping and -nationalizing- that rule. The Poles of Poznan played a crucial role in the postwar national revolution in which Poland was ethnically cleansed by a joint effort of the people and...

Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and events on the Eastern Front that same year were pivotal to the history of World War II. It was during this year that the radicalization of Nazi policy -- through both an all-encompassing approach to warfare and the application of genocidal practices -- became most obvious. Germany's military aggression and overtly ideological conduct, culminating in genocide against Soviet Jewry and the decimation of the Soviet population through planned starvation and brutal antipartisan policies, distinguished Operation Barbarossa-the code name...