Overview

This is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children’s historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of 41 books – novels, novellas, picturebooks, short stories, and a graphic novel. The first three chapters focus on texts about the complex process of becoming Ukrainian Canadian, showcasing the experiences of the first two waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, including encounters with Indigenous Peoples and the First World War Internment. The last two chapters are devoted to the significance of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and the Second World War for Ukrainian Canadians. All the chapters demonstrate the entanglements of Ukrainian and Canadian history and point to the role Anglophone children’s literature can play in preventing the symbolical seeds of memory from withering. This volume argues that reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory. Such memory created through reading is multidimensional as it involves the interpretation of both the present and the past by an individual whose reality has been directly or indirectly shaped by the past over which they have no influence. Next-generation memory is of anticipatory character, which means that authors of historical fiction anticipate the readers – both present-day and future – not to have direct links to any witnesses of the events they discuss and to have little knowledge of the transcultural character of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora.

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9781032435718

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Reviews

""I would heartily recommend this book not just to scholars and educators but also to the wider public. It is a truly pioneering study and is definitely more timely now than its author could ever have imagined. Each of the chapters is accompanied by extensive and detailed endnotes, and the work concludes with an impressive bibliography of primary and secondary texts."" --Lindsay Myers, University of Galway ""Mateusz Świetlicki’s book monograph is not only an important contribution to the study of Ukrainian Canadian and Canadian children’s literature, highlighting the history of Ukraine and the relations of Ukrainians with other peoples in Canada, but also a fascinating story about how reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory."" --Tetiana Kachak, Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University, Ukraine

Author Information

Mateusz Świetlicki is Assistant Professor at the University of Wrocław’s Institute of English Studies and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture. His scholarship focuses on North American and Ukrainian children’s and YA literature and culture, memory, gender, and queer studies, as well as popular culture and film. He has published in English, Ukrainian, Polish, and Croatian.

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