A Time for the Province proposes innovative readings of historical and contemporary Polish borderlands as a complex dialogic zone, offering new ways of connecting the Polish past(s) with the country’s present and its future. Across seven chapters, as the study dives into narratives by some of Poland’s most iconic modern authors, including the 2018 Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, it engages with fields of memory and postmemory studies, postsocialist studies, Holocaust history, Jewish-Polish relations, and ethnic and migration studies. Drawing on writings of such contemporary Polish critics as Przemysław Czapliński and Krzysztof Czyżewski, postcolonial theorists including Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, and philosophers of the human environment such as Gaston Bachelard, A Time for the Province revises and complicates traditional conceptions of what the province and the borderland represent and perform within Polish literary and cultural practice, reframing this space as both a contact zone and a palimpsest.
George Gasyna is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and editor in chief of the Slavic & East European Journal (SEEJ). Born in Łódź, Poland, he and his family emigrated to Ontario, Canada – home of one of the largest and most vibrant Polish diasporas in North America – when he was 12. Prof. Gasyna holds a BA and an MA in Russian and Slavic Studies from McGill University in Montreal, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto (2005). Specializing in Polish literature of the 20th century, his work engages with a number of adjacent fields including émigré and exilic discourses, heritage and diaspora studies, and Polish-Jewish relations, as well as travel writing and memoir. Prof. Gasyna is author of Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), and editor for the volume of essays Joseph Conrad’s Polish Soul: Realms of Memory and Self (2016). His scholarship has appeared in a number of critical collections and journals including Slavic Review, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Polish Review, and Russian Literature. His most recent book, A Time for the Province: Palimpsests and Borders in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature, was published in spring 2025 by McGill-Queen's University Press.