Wczesny modernizm w demonicznej odsłonie
Early Modernism in a Demonic Scene

Review: Gabriela Matuszek, Maski i demony wczesnego modernizmu. (Kraków 2014)

Summary/Abstract: The review discusses Gabriela Matuszek’s book "Maski i demony wczesnego modernizmu" ("Masks and demons of early modernism") (Cracow 2014), an assortment of 13 monographic sketches published earlier in collective volumes, conference proceedings and scholarly periodicals. It is an interesting edition among the recent literary historical and cultural studies analyses about the strand of thought and artistic achievements of the turn of 19th and 20th centuries which rightly recognises the writers’ self-knowledge about the hidden phobias, anxiety and obsessions of a man at the “threshold of modernity” - all of which so far either rejected from awareness or intentionally dissembled. Matuszek’s sketches are devoted to the interpretation of important Young Poland’s writers’ creativity (inter alia Stanisław Wyspiański, Stefan Żeromski, Stanisław Przybyszewski and Stanisław Brzozowski) as well as to the analysis of Polish premodernism phenomena as, e.g. misogyny, incest, neurosis, hysteria, formalistic narcissism, nihilism, emancipation of women. In her considerations the author employs the tools used in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, cultural anthropology, feminist literary theory and gender studies.

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