Growing Up and Memory of the Margins in Patricia Nell Warren’s (Patricia Kilina’s) "Billy’s Boy"
Mateusz Świetlicki, dr
Uniwersytet Wrocławski , Polandhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-7009-3837
Justyna Mętrak, Pani
Uniwersytet Wrocławski , Polandhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-9861-4403
Abstract
While numerous news outlets in Ukraine reported about the passing of Patricia Nell Warren, as of 2019, none of her anglophone works has been translated into Ukrainian. This fact seems surprising because Warren, the first wife of George Tarnawsky, disenchanted with the lack of success with her work in English, in the 1960s published a few volumes of poetry in Ukrainian under the pen name Patricia Kilina and hence has a strong link to the Ukrainian literary process. Although a few scholarly articles have been published about Warren’s most popular novel, The Front Runner (1974), its sequels have not been studied yet. The aim of this article is to fill this gap by analyzing Billy’s Boy (1997) in the perspective of memory studies. Analyzing Billy’s Boy, the authors of this article want to argue that by depicting the coming-of-age experience of John William, the twelve-year-old son of Billy Sive who tries to find his own identity and find out more about his father, Warren manages to not only show that cultivating the postmemory of Billy and trying to understand his roots are crucial in the process of William’s maturation, but also portrays social changes happening in America in the late 1990s.
Keywords:
coming-of-age, memory, postmemory, American Literature, Ukrainian Literature, queer memoryReferences
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Uniwersytet Wrocławski https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7009-3837
