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Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions explores the aggressive sexualization of the Ukrainian cultural mainstream after the collapse of the USSR as a counter-reaction to the Soviet state's totalitarian, repressive politics of the body. While the book's introduction includes concise sections on such pornified cultural forms as advertising, mass media, visual art, and film, its major focus is on textual production that has contributed significantly to the literary explosion in Ukraine, which began in the 1990s. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, feminist, and gender theories, the book examines transgressive potentials of the erotic under postcolonial, postcommunist, and post-totalitarian conditions. It offers insight into the convoluted dialectics between the imported conventions of Western "porno-chic" and the received oppressive Soviet gender and sexual ideologies. Within a broad historical and cultural framework, the study considers writers' engagements in dialogues with their own tradition and colonial legacy, as well as with a variety of transcultural flows. By bringing together diverse erotomaniac fictions, Maryna Romanets charts the ways in which they are embedded in the processes of Ukraine's cultural decolonization.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Translation and Transliteration
1 Introduction to Erotomaniac Fictions
2 Nationalist-Masochist Woman, Impotent Man, and Counter-Erotics: Pol'ovi doslidzhennia z ukraïns'koho seksu [Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex]
3 A Guide to the Art of (Post-)Soviet Pleasure: Pokalchuk's Taxonomies
4 Carnivalesque Mystifications, National Icon, and Orientalist Dreams: Zhytiie haremnoie [Life in the Harem] as Historiographic Metafiction
5 The Monstrosity of Desire and the Delights of Carnal Hell: Shevchuk's
Neo-Baroque Angst
6 Indecent Transpositions and Displacements of the National Imaginary by the Kapranov Brothers
7 Pornographized Desecration of the Socialist Realist Canon: Poderviansky the Bricoleur
8 Postscript
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Maryna Romanets is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. She is the author of Anamorphosic Texts and Reconfigured Visions: Improvised traditions in Contemporary Ukrainian and Irish Literature and co-editor of Beauty, Violence, Representation.
Summary
By bringing together diverse erotomaniac fictions, Maryna Romanets charts the ways in which they are embedded in the processes of Ukraine's cultural decolonization.
