Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions - Marina Romanets Kartoniert (TB)

In Anamorphosic Texts Maryna Romanets turns a discriminating lens on a still liminal Ukrainian cultural space and through its relation to the experiences of one of the earliest decolonized nations Ireland puts it on the discursive postcolonial map thereby destabilizing the paradigm of homogeneous Eurocentricity adopted by much postcolonial critique. Bringing together two peripheral European literatures Romanets uses Irish and Ukrainian histories as a shared point of reference charting an essentially untouched area of comparative typology in postcolonial cultural politics. Returning to t he chiaroscuro terrain of respective nineteenth-century Revivalist movements she projects their volatile energies onto contemporary struggles of the two cultures to represent their occluded traumatic pasts and ever-evasive presents. In five linked essays Romanets explores in their sociocultural contexts the works of Kostenko Ní Dhomhnaill Zabuzhko Pokalchuk Vynnychuk Poderviansky Longley Heaney Murphy Carson Montague Banville and Izdryk. She examines the ways these authors evoke the significatory powers of their traditions to forge imaginary ones interrogate the boundaries and slippages among personal national social gendered and historical disjunctions and make every history open to revision and contestation. Drawing on postcolonial intertextual representation and gender theories Anamorphosic Texts reveals the mechanisms of conversion whereby Ukrainian and Irish writers by engaging in epistemic dialogues with their own traditions colonial discourses and multicultural influxes devise political strategies of empowerment and enunciation.