This thesis is a creative-critical response to perceptions and representations of Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans that I term mis/recognitions. It consists of a creative component in the form of a novel, The Vampire’s Mirror (67,000 words), and an accompanying critical commentary entitled “Mis/Recognitions: Staging Eastern Europe in Literature and Culture” (26,000 words). 

           The Vampire’s Mirror employs error as its mechanism of emplotment by dramatizing the predicament of the Eastern European migrant/writer who is often placed in a position of having to account for her cultural and linguistic difference. It tells the story of Ljubitsa Angelova, a Bulgarian translator in an alternative post-Brexit Britain where all forms of translation are under political control.

           The critical component contextualises the novel in an exploration of the ways in which characters and settings are scripted, produced and known as Eastern European in a broad range of fiction and film from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries as based on a critical framework derived from theorizations of mis/recognition in psychoanalysis, social and political theory, philosophy, and literary and narrative theory.

           The critical component also examines the writing back strategies I sought to adopt in The Vampire’s Mirror as informed by postcolonial and post-communist literary revisions, literary back-translation, narrative accounting and genre experimentation.