Ukrainian women writers and the national imaginary : from the collapse of the USSR to the Euromaidan /

As this volume shows, since the collapse of the Soviet Union Ukraine has seen a boom in women's writing and female literary trendsetters. Wallo (Univ. of Kansas) traces the emergence and impact of female voices in Ukrainian literature in the 21st century, focusing on three writers: Oksana Zabuzhko (b. 1960), Yevhenia Kononenko (b. 1959), and Maria Matios (b. 1959). Their transformation from "marginal" to "central" was in large part connected with their participation in the post-Soviet project of Ukrainian national identity, in which they actively participated in the process of forging a new collective identity for Ukraine through literary prose with a distinctively female voice. These writers share a commitment to the complexity and authenticity of writing female lives, though their comfort levels with the term "feminism" vary. Chapter 1 offers historical context for Ukrainian women's fiction, and chapters 2--5 engage in close readings of individual works, in dialogue with themes like commercial success, feminism, and collective national identity. In chapter 6, the author offers a picture of contemporary Ukrainian female collective experience by exploring the testimonies of women who participated in the 2013--14 Euromaidan movement, a wave of protests that led to the 2014 Ukrainian "revolution of dignity." Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Alyssa DeBlasio, Dickinson College