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What does it mean to be Ukrainian in contemporary Canada? The Ukrainian Canadian writers in Unbound challenge the conventions of genre - memoir, fiction, poetry, biography, essay - and the boundaries that separate ethnic and authorial identities and fictional and non-fictional narratives. These intersections become the sites of new, thought-provoking and poignant creative writing by some of Canada's best-known Ukrainian Canadian authors. To complement the creative writing, editors Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski offer an overview of the history of Ukrainian settlement in Canada and an extensive bibliography of Ukrainian Canadian literature in English. Unbound is the first such exploration of Ukrainian Canadian literature and a book that should be on the shelves of Canadian literature fans and those interested in the study of ethnic, postcolonial, and diasporic literature.

Ukrainian immigrants to Canada have often been portrayed in history as sturdy pioneer farmers cultivating the virgin land of the Canadian west. The essays in this collection challenge this stereotype by examining the varied experiences of Ukrainian-Canadians in their day-to-day roles as writers, intellectuals, national organizers, working-class wage earners, and inhabitants of cities and towns. Throughout, the contributors remain dedicated to promoting the study of ethnic, hyphenated histories as major currents in mainstream Canadian history. Topics explored include Ukrainian-Canadian radicalism, the consequences of the Cold War for Ukrainians both at home and abroad, the creation and maintenance of ethnic memories, and community discord embodied by pro-Nazis, Communists, and criminals. Re-Imagining Ukrainian-Canadians uses new sources and non-traditional methods of analysis to answer unstudied and often controversial questions within the field. Collectively, the essays challenge the older, essentialist definition of what it means to be Ukrainian-Canadian.

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