How can one write national literature history in a “glocal” world? : remarks on the writing of a modern polish literature handbook in English

In this article I should like to explain how I plan to work on a one-volume English-language history of Polish literature that is supposed to address both foreign and Polish readers. While foreign readers should acquire some perspective on one of the relatively unknown European literatures, domestic readers should be helped to see their well-known literature from different cultural angles. I will discuss several issues connected with the writing of such a handbook, namely: existing ways of presenting Polish literature internationally, the inner mechanisms and the outer relationships of Polish literature, its local and global aspects (also in the case of immigrant literature), the increasing importance of discussing intertextuality and intermediality of the literature as well as new forms of hybridisation of literary language. My article is meant to illustrate and discuss some problems of presenting a “local” literature on the global literary-history market today.