The stormy history of Poland has made commitment a staple feature of much Polish writing. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, Czeslaw Milosz is not only a good example of a Polish committed writer, he also illustrates the complexity of literary commitment in contemporary society. The centenary of his birth in 2011 offered the opportunity to tackle the question of writers commitment during the international conference -From Your Land to Poland: On the Commitment of the Writer in European and Polish Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries-, which took place on the 17th and the...

Beat Literature in Europe offers twelve in-depth analyses of how European authors and intellectuals on both sides of the Iron Curtain read, translated and appropriated American Beat literature. The chapters combine textual analysis with discussions on the role Beat had in popular music, art, and different subcultures. The book participates in the transnational turn that has gained in importance during the past years in literary studies, looking at transatlantic connections through the eyes of European authors, artists and intellectuals, and showing how Beat became a cluster of texts, images,...