RT Journal Article
T1 Weeding out the Roots? Migrant Identity in A.M. Bakalar’s Polish-British Fiction
A1 Bryla, Martyna Marika
K1 Inmigrantes en la literatura
AB Poles are one of the largest non-UK born ethnic groups in all countries and most regions of the United Kingdom. Since Poland’s accession to the European Union in May 2004, thousands of Poles have migrated to the UK, hoping for better professional opportunities and higher standards of living. It was thus only a matter of time before Poles started to put their experience of migration on paper. One example is A.M. Bakalar, whose literary debut, Madame Mephisto (2012), was promoted as the voice of the new wave of Polish migration and the first novel to be written in English by a Polish female author since Poland joined the EU in 2004. This article centres on Bakalar’s protagonist, a thirty-year-old Pole in London, with the aim of revealing how cultural myths and beliefs feed into the process of identity formation and what it takes for the experience of migration to go awry. By exploring Magda’s problematic relationship with her home country, represented as oppressive and insular, this article inquiries into the nature of contemporary migrant experience and the role which national identity plays in the process of cultural adjustment.
PB Universidad Complutense
YR 2020
FD 2020
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10630/33903
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10630/33903
LA eng
NO Bryla M. (2020). Weeding out the Roots? Migrant Identity in A.M. Bakalar’s Polish-British Fiction. Complutense Journal of English Studies, 28, 1-10. https://doi.org/10.5209/cjes.61109
NO The author is grateful to the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (Postdoctoral grant María Teresa Turell) which funded her biblio-graphical search in the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library in London, and Universidad de Málaga (Contrato Postdoctoral) for supporting the research carried out for the writing of this article. This research forms part of a project awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2017-86417-P).
DS RIUMA. Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Málaga
RD 21 ene 2026