Autobiografia (Jan 2024)
The Life behind the Books: Reconstructing the Przeworskis’ Biographies
Abstract
Adopting critical and feminist archival approaches, this article reconstructs the dis/continuous biographies of the Przeworskis, intertwined with the activities of Wydawnictwo J. Przeworskiego (J. Przeworski Publishing House) that excelled at innovative life-writing and fiction, avant-garde aesthetics, works of progressive intellectuals, and bestsellers by women writers. As the Przeworskis were cultural mediators active in the global transfer of modernist works in Central Europe and in the UK, select UK and US archives act as substitute repositories, allowing to fill in some gaps in the scholarship on J. Przeworski. The article focuses on marginalised women publishers whose role in modernist publishing networks has been currently discovered. Drawing on publishing correspondence, the biographical reconstruction is supported by recollections of family, other people in the literary marketplace, and Holocaust survivors. The research findings highlight the need to re-investigate previous assumptions on interwar print culture, frequently based on limited data and reproducing the mechanisms of systemic violence.
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