Abstract
Extant research on how Polish migration to Britain is represented in literature often focuses on contemporary texts, sees Polish migrants as forming part of a larger, Eastern European flow of people, and uses postcolonial theories and concepts. This chapter discusses the genesis, merits, and disadvantages of such a ‘three-layered-lens’ and proposes a complementary methodology that is diachronic, focuses on Polish migration alone, and is inspired by modern imagology. While the first part of the chapter is devoted to theoretical and methodological concerns, the second performs imagological analyses of two British novels: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and John Lanchester’s Capital (2012). This approach reveals the surprisingly positive place the Polish migrant holds in (parts of) the British literary imaginary, which sets up a contrast between the ‘good’ Pole and an ostensibly ‘ailing’ Britain.
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Notes
- 1.
Joanna Kosmalska, “The Response of Polish Writers to Brexit,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 26, no. 2 (2019): 167.
- 2.
Conrad’s Polish heritage is, however, difficult to discern in his oeuvre, because, as Adam Gillon explains, he “never took Poland as the central theme of his work; in fact, he shunned it” (424).
- 3.
Carlos Vargas-Silva and Peter William Walsh, “EU Migration to and from the UK,” The Migration Observatory, October 2, 2020. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-an-overview (accessed March 24, 2021).
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Birgit Neumann, “Fictions of Migration: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004). and Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006),” in The British Novel in the Twenty-first Century: Cultural Concerns – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations, ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 87.
- 6.
Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw: A Novel, ed. Thomas McLean and Ruth Knezevich (1803; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); John Lanchester, Capital (London: Faber, 2012).
- 7.
Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff, Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).
- 8.
Joanna Rostek and Dirk Uffelmann, “Can the Polish Migrant Speak? The Representation of ‘Subaltern’ Polish Migrants in Film, Literature and Music from Britain and Poland,” in Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).
- 9.
Marie-Luise Egbert, “‘Old Poles’ and ‘New Blacks’: The Polish Immigrant Experience in Britain,” in Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 349.
- 10.
Vedrana Veličković, Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe (London: Palgrave, 2019).
- 11.
Veličković, Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Imagining New Europe, 6.
- 12.
Dirk Uffelmann, Polska literatura postkolonialna. Od sarmatyzmu do migracji poakcesyjnej (Cracow: Universitas, 2020).
- 13.
For example, Rostek and Uffelmann, “Can the Polish Migrant Speak”; Nora Plesske and Joanna Rostek, “Rubble or Resurrection: Contextualising London Literature by Polish Migrants to the UK,” Literary London Journal 10, no. 2 (2013), http://literarylondon.org/the-literary-london-journal/archive-of-the-literary-london-journal/issue-10-2/rubble-or-resurrection-contextualising-london-literature-by-polish-migrants-to-the-uk/.
- 14.
The Accession 8 countries include the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
- 15.
Barbara Korte, “Facing the East of Europe in Its Western Isles: Charting Backgrounds, Questions and Perspectives,” in Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker, and Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 17.
- 16.
See, for example, Roy Sommer, Fictions of Migration: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Gattungstypologie des zeitgenössischen interkulturellen Romans in Großbritannien (Trier: WVT, 2001).
- 17.
Uffelmann, Polska literatura postkolonialna, 8, my translation.
- 18.
Veličković, Eastern Europeans, 10.
- 19.
Yva Alexandrova, Here to Stay: Eastern Europeans in Britain (London: Repeater, 2021), 4.
- 20.
Alexandrova, Here to Stay: Eastern Europeans in Britain, 3.
- 21.
Doris Bachmann-Medick, “Migration as Translation,” in Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches, ed. Doris Bachmann-Medick and Jens Kugele (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 275–6; Heike Paul, Mapping Migration: Women’s Writing and the American Immigrant Experience from the 1950s to the 1990s (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999), 26–33.
- 22.
Anna Veronika Wendland, “Cultural Transfer,” in Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, ed. Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), 61.
- 23.
Bachmann-Medick, “Migration as Translation,” 275–276.
- 24.
Aneta Pavlenko, “Superdiversity and Why It Isn’t: Reflections on Terminological Innovation and Academic Branding,” in Sloganization in Language Education Discourse: Conceptual Thinking in the Age of Academic Marketization, ed. Barbara Schmenk, Stephan Breidbach, and Lutz Küster (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2018), 162.
- 25.
Korte, “Facing the East,” 16.
- 26.
The boundaries between imagology and postcolonial theory are, of course, far from impermeable. Recent trends in imagology have profited from contributions from postcolonial studies (Leerssen 22). Besides, the research questions of imagologists bear some resemblance to what cultural and postcolonial scholars examine in the context of representations: see, for example, Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997).
- 27.
Joep Leerssen, “Imagology: On Using Ethnicity to Make Sense of the World,” Iberic@l: Revue d’études ibériques et ibéro-américaines 10 (2016): 14, https://imagologica.eu/CMS/upload/Imagology2016.pdf.
- 28.
Leerssen, “Imagology” 16.
- 29.
Leerssen, “Imagology,” 29; See also Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn, and Joep Leerssen, “On Translated Images, Stereotypes and Disciplines,” in Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology, ed. Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn, and Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016), 1.
- 30.
Discounting the concept of the nation moreover runs the risk of a-historicity: Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw appeared at a time that saw the birth of the modern nation and ensuing national wars in which Britain and Poland were, if differently, implicated. For a discussion of the value and challenges pertaining to the concept of the nation in the context of cultural studies, see Joanna Rostek and Gerold Sedlmayr. “Grayson Perry’s Brexit Vases as National Psychotherapy: Feelings (and) Matter.” In Mentalities and Materialities: Essays in Honour of Jürgen Kamm, ed. Philip Jacobi and Anette Pankratz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021).
- 31.
Leerssen, “Imagology,” 20.
- 32.
It goes without saying that because of this limited corpus, my analysis does not amount to a full-length imagological study, which would need to consider more texts and take into account the reverse perspective, that is, texts written by Polish migrants to the UK. I have examined Polish texts on migration to the UK elsewhere (Plesske and Rostek, “Rubble or Resurrection”; Rostek and Uffelmann “Can the Polish Migrant Speak”; Rostek, “Living the British Dream”), though not through an explicitly imagological lens. For analyses of literary texts written by Polish migrants to the UK—for example, by A.M. Bakalar, Agnieszka Dale, Wioletta Greg, and Grzegorz Kopaczewski—see the other contributions in this volume.
- 33.
Thomas McLean, “Introduction,” in Thaddeus of Warsaw: A Novel, by Jane Porter, ed. Thomas McLean and Ruth Knezevich (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), xii–xiii.
- 34.
McLean, “Introduction,” in Thaddeus of Warsaw: A Novel, by Jane Porter, xvii.
- 35.
Thomas McLean, “Brexit Britain: Was Jane Austen an Original Little Englander?” The Conversation, December 6, 2019, https://theconversation.com/brexit-britain-was-jane-austen-an-original-little-englander-128478 (accessed April 29, 2022).
- 36.
Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw: A Novel (1803; Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2011), 406; the aforementioned poems have been reprinted in the appendix to the modern edition of Thaddeus of Warsaw.
- 37.
Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 3.
- 38.
Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 3–4.
- 39.
McLean, “Introduction,” xxi.
- 40.
Colin Watson, “Novel of Manners,” in The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, ed. Rosemary Herbert (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), https://www-oxfordreference-com.ezproxy.uni-giessen.de/view/10.1093/acref/9780195072396.001.0001/acref-9780195072396-e-0466 (accessed April 29, 2022).
- 41.
Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 105.
- 42.
Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 114.
- 43.
Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 108.
- 44.
Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw, 105–106.
- 45.
Porter’s is not the only early nineteenth-century literary text to feature a noble Polish protagonist. Claire Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Shelley, published a tale titled “The Pole” in 1832. The narrator describes the eponymous Pole in rapturous terms: “In stature he was sufficiently tall to give an idea of superiority to his fellow mortals; and his form was moulded in such perfect proportions, that it presented a rare combination of youthful lightness and manly strength. His countenance, had you taken from it its deep thoughtfulness and its expression of calm intrepid bravery, might have belonged to the most lovely woman, so transparently blooming was his complexion, so regular his features, so blond and luxuriant his hair. […] he had performed actions of such determined and daring bravery as had made his name a glory to his countrymen, and a terror to their enemies. […] [He was] this Mars in a human form, this Achilles who had braved death in a thousand shapes […]” (347, 362).
- 46.
Katy Shaw, Crunch Lit (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
- 47.
Lanchester, Capital, 70.
- 48.
Lanchester, Capital, 69.
- 49.
Lanchester, Capital, 70.
- 50.
Lanchester, Capital, 72.
- 51.
Alexandrova, Here to Stay, 3.
- 52.
Lanchester, Capital, 75.
- 53.
Veličković, Eastern Europeans, 89.
- 54.
Lanchester, Capital, 70.
- 55.
Lanchester, Capital, 289.
- 56.
Lanchester, Capital, 69.
- 57.
Lanchester, Capital, 551.
- 58.
Lanchester, Capital, 552.
- 59.
Leerssen, “Imagology,” 19.
- 60.
Leerssen, “Imagology,” 19.
- 61.
Korte, “Facing the East,” 5, emphasis mine.
- 62.
Veličković, Eastern, 17, second emphasis mine.
- 63.
For a discussion of the (limited) articulation of Polish migrants in literary and cultural texts from the UK and Poland, see Rostek and Uffelmann, “Can the Polish Migrant Speak.”
- 64.
Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 274.
- 65.
A full-scale imagological investigation would also have to take into account the representation of Polish migrants in British film and television. The constellation of the “good Pole” in an “ailing Britain” can, for example, be retraced in Ken Loach’s feature film It’s A Free World … (2007), in the series of sketches about a Polish plumber in the Omid Djalili Show (BBC One, 2007–2009), and in Meera Syal’s short Brexit play/video “Just a T-Shirt” (2017).
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Rostek, J. (2023). The Good Pole in an Ailing Britain: An Imagological Approach to Polish Migration in British Literature. In: Bowers, M.A., Dew, B. (eds) Polish Culture in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32188-7_11
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