The Transformative Power of Women's Life Writing in Post-Communist Europe

'The Transformative Power of Women’s Life Writing in Post-Communist Europe is a rich and engaging collection that examines women’s life narratives shaped by post/communist experiences, migration, and East–West imaginaries. Through studies of memoir, autobiography, graphic narrative, autofiction, and embodied forms of self-representation, it introduces readers to compelling voices, recent experiences, and cultural contexts often overlooked in European literary and memory studies. Emerging from sustained East–West scholarly encounters, the volume is distinguished by its collaborative and dialogic ethos as well as the breadth and originality of its corpus. Thoughtfully curated and wide-ranging in scope, it will be of interest to scholars working at the intersection of life-writing, memory, and European studies.'
Ioana Luca, Professor of English, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan.

'This carefully edited interdisciplinary volume is a fruit of the collective labour of gathering cultural testimony and witnessing to the vicissitudes of memory in the period of post-communist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. Focusing on such places as Ukraine, the former GDR, Romania, Slovakia, and others, the essays gathered here speak to the challenges of post-Cold War dialogue among the continent’s disparate regions and identities. Attuned to the intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, geography, and race, the collection offers a much-needed intervention into Europe’s grand imaginary, exposing its geographical fractures, historical amnesia, and orientalizing tendencies along the West-East fault lines. This contribution widens an auto/biography studies’ perspective by introducing a cluster of experimental and embodied life writing practices that use their liminal positionality as a site of memory activism.'
Eva C. Karpinski, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada.