The Transformative Power of Women's Life Writing in Post-Communist Europe: East-West Perceptions and Memory

This edited volume explores how women’s life writing from post-Communist Europe turns the continent’s most persistent fault line – the East–West divide – into a space of confrontation, vulnerability, and radical reimagining.

Examining personal narratives from seven European countries (Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Germany, France, and the Netherlands), the volume demonstrates how women "write back" to Western gazes, decolonize memory, and unsettle entrenched hierarchies that continue to position Eastern Europe as the "other Europe" even after the fall of communism and EU integration. By combining transnational, transdisciplinary, and embodied approaches from the fields of life writing, literature, and memory studies, this volume proposes alternative modes of scholarly engagement that privilege personal experiences, relationality, vulnerability, and genuine exchange over abstraction, offering new perspectives on how European identities, histories, and futures might be thought together.

Facilitating a distinctive collaboration among scholars from Eastern and Western Europe, The Transformative Power of Women's Life Writing in Post-Communist Europe will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in women’s life writing, European memory, memory studies, contested memory, post-communist Europe, and East-West perceptions.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Simona Mitroiu is a senior researcher at “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania.

Marleen Rensen is an associate professor in the Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Anna Seidl, a former principal dancer of the Het National Ballet (HNB, Amsterdam), is a senior researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Ivana Taranenková is a senior research fellow and the director of the Institute of Slovak Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.

Catherine Teissier is a senior lecturer for German Studies at Aix-Marseille University, France.