Kampania wrześniowa jako doświadczenie męskości żołnierskiej
The September Campaign as an Experience of Military Masculinity

Summary/Abstract: Tomasik explores military masculinity in literary representations of Poland’s defensive war in September 1939. Melchior Wańkowicz’s reportage presents two types of heroism for a Polish soldier – one coded as knightly or noble and one coded as part of peasant culture; Wojciech Żukrowski’s prose portrays the soldier’s homosocial desire and masculine combat ecstasy, while in Jan Józef Szczepański’s Polska jesień [Polish Autumn] the September campaign is presented as a male initiation rite. In the works analysed here men’s experience of the defensive war focuses on two notions that would be key to the later development of Polish masculinity, namely heroism and defeat.

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