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Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publications, 2001. 128 pp. $45.00 hc.
With Canadian literature becoming increasingly diversified, critical studies of that diversity make a welcome contribution to our understanding of what has been termed ethnic or immigrant writing. One of the older ethnicities is that of Ukrainians, who have come to Canada in four distinct waves: 1890-1914; 1920-1939; 1948-1955, and post-1991. Dr. Sonya Mycak is an Australian-based scholar who builds an argument for the nature of Canadian-Ukrainian writing based on her study of a novel (Yellow Boots 1954), a collection of short stories (Two Lands/New Visions 1998), a single short story, a screenplay, and a play. Whether this body of work is sufficient to draw significant conclusions is certainly debatable.
Mycak's use of the term "Canuke" and "Canadian-Ukrainian" in the title refers to her emphasis on the Canadian aspects of the Ukrainian experience in fictional material produced during the second half of the twentieth century by Ukrainian-Canadians born in Canada. Every author she selects is a woman, and the texts are analysed from the perspective of their making "woman as site of Canadian-Ukrainian culture" (p. 2). She claims this produces "...a gendered vision of culture" (p. 29). The gendered nature of her vision is not reflected in the book's title.
In her study of Canadian-Ukrainian women's literature, Mycak finds a...