Since the fall of communism, scholars from Poland and abroad have made tremendous strides in research on Polish women’s writing. Until now, however, these studies have focused primarily on women’s literature from prior to 1989 or have appeared only in Polish. Notably, a study in English on contemporary women writers from Poland has been missing. Urszula Chowaniec’s book fills this lacuna. As the title indicates, this study combines four analytical elements: melancholy, migration, body, and women’s writing. Chowaniec links these four motifs to “gendered and feminist perspectives on literature and examine[s] whether the images of displacement in women’s writing can be seen as a gendered critique of contemporary culture and politics” (2). The theme of women’s writing unifies Melancholic Migrating Bodies, which consists of eight chapters divided into three parts. While each of the three parts gives primacy to one of the main motifs outlined in the introduction, Chowaniec takes care never to lose sight of how the main concepts of her argument intersect and mutually define one another.

Part I, “Recognition and Appropriation,” focuses on defining key concepts of the text. Chapter 1 constitutes one of the best English-language explanations of the phrase “women’s writing” and its evolving meaning in Poland from the 1990s until today. Chapter 2 analyzes manifestations of melancholy in post-89 women’s writing as expressed through descriptions of longing, loss, and alienation from one’s self and body. Drawing on descriptions of melancholy by such authors as Antoni Kępiński, Julia Kristeva, and Juliana Schiesari, Chowaniec shows melancholy as a gendered phenomenon that has a social dimension in women’s writing, rather than an “individualistic inability to comply with the social order” as traditionally seen in men’s writing (47). The three chapters of Part II (“Migrants, Strangers, Travellers”) engage the notions of journeying, intimacy between strangers, and émigré literature. In Chapter 3, Chowaniec locates the works of Izabela Filipiak, Manuela Gretkowska, and Olga Tokarczuk in the mythological and fairy tale traditions of the “wanderer,” demonstrating how each author “provides us with a new perspective on this historically and symbolically masculine topic” (83). Another chapter shows how women’s writing after 1989 goes beyond the politically determined and male-centered notion of “émigré literature” and “brings the literary text close to a form of therapy for treating melancholy” caused by the estrangement of the (e)migration experience (137). Part III, “The Body as an Abject,” explores the textual representation of the ruined body as related to melancholy and the challenges inherent in expressing physical experience through language. In these chapters, Chowaniec shows how the “suffering body becomes not only a feminist metaphor for recovering the other,” but signifies a “move towards emerging out of symbolic thinking, extending even beyond sex/gender” (164). Here, Chowaniec offers close readings of Tokarczuk’s Room numbers and E.E. in which women’s writing meets ecocriticism and posthumanist melancholy. These interpretations, as well as that of Tokarczuk’s Bieguni [Runners] in chapter three, are particularly intriguing.

Chowaniec’s rich bibliography is worthy of note. It includes theoretical works familiar to English-language audiences and introduces English-language readers to Polish-language literature and scholarly works. In addition to the above mentioned authors, readers learn about such contemporary writers as Justyna Bargielska, Joanna Bator, and Grażyna Plebanek. Chowaniec also demonstrates the utility of applying western feminist approaches to the analysis of Polish literature and the importance of juxtaposing these theories with feminist and non-feminist Polish literary and cultural studies scholarship. She considers the work of such thinkers as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray, while engaging the scholarship of such Polish literary historians as Przemysław Czapliński and Maria Janion. In this way, Chowaniec continues to bridge the theoretical east-west divide that she has explored and discussed in her previous scholarship.

Chowaniec’s writing is mostly clear and free of jargon. While the three parts of the book are compelling, the text sometimes requires an effort on the part of the reader to make connections between the concepts set forth in the introductory chapters. Also, the publication could have used a stronger editorial team as typographic errors remain throughout. These shortcomings, however, do not detract from Chowaniec’s work as a whole. Melancholic Migrating Bodies makes a solid contribution to feminist, migration, Polish, and Slavic studies. It also serves as a compendium to scholars interested in contemporary writing from central and eastern Europe.