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 the 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.
