Date of Award

2008

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Department

English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing

Keywords

Language, literature and linguistics

Supervisor

Susan Holbrook

Supervisor

Eugene McNamara

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

The Thirty Kilometre Zone' is about a man who becomes lost in the shadows of an unspeakable and unvoiced past, who sets off into the core of his mother's secrets with the hope of somehow finding a way out of the traumatic cycles that have defined them both. Through a parallel narrative, long-eluded memories overtake his mother's dying mind, the very past shielded by a silence meant to save her son from sorrow. The themes of Chornobyl and Stalin's Famine-Genocides are interwoven through a mainly contemporary setting. After the accident at Chornobyl, Ukraine, authorities defined the fallout field by means of three successive contamination zones extending from the power plant. The radioactive environment has been termed the exclusion zone, the alienation zone, or the thirty kilometer zone. It is this motif that informs both the narrative's themes and title.

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