Lauren Warner-Treloar

Experimental Book Arts: Re-interpreting the fluidities of Ukrainian identity in Eastern Europe, 1890s-1930s

This thesis examines the construction of cultural identity through innovations in book arts in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s, focusing on the Ukrainian context. Positioned at the intersection of bibliography, cultural studies, and performance studies, it explores transnational and experimental book collaborations such as artists’ books that emerged during a period of national awakening and political upheaval and investigates them as critical sites for articulating and negotiating cultural identities by conceptualising the books as materially situated and culturally encoded objects.

This interdisciplinary project foregrounds the book as a historical artefact as well as a performative space, building on McKenzie’s sociology of texts framework (1986, 1999) and Drucker’s concepts of the performative materiality of the book and typography as a semiotic resource (1994, 1995, 2004). To address the entangled histories of the region and the marginalisation of Ukrainian identity, the thesis also draws on Ilnytzkyj’s concept of Imperial culture (2024). It examines in tandem how the tangible forms of the book produce meaning and articulate identity as a lens for illuminating cultural politics in Ukraine during the late imperial Russian and early Soviet period and responds to Drucker’s call for further research into the artists’ book genre, a critically important art form of the twentieth century.

Utilising a comparative case-study methodology, this thesis analyses a selection of book collaborations produced in Ukraine during the period in question and argues that through typography, aesthetics, materiality, messaging, and performativity, the book arts provided a platform for the expression of the forces and tensions inherent to the cultural dynamics in play in Ukraine. It explores how producers operating there engaged in the modernist book experiment and how their trajectories aligned with or departed from those of their counterparts in other Eastern European activity centres, such as Moscow, St Petersburg, Łódź and Prague, as well as Berlin, Milan, and Paris in Western Europe. By focusing on producers in Ukraine within the wider context of the period’s turbulent political, cultural, and artistic developments, this thesis breaks new ground in our understanding of the book experiment that emerged there and its place in the European context. In doing so, it deepens our understanding of the artists’ book genre and of Ukrainian cultural identity.