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This chronologically arranged collection of essays explores the concept of exile, from the literal to the metaphorical, in Western literary works, such as those of Hrothswitha of Gandersheim, Dante, Unamuno, Heinrich Boell, and Irish and Latin American contemporary writers.
The Literature of Emigration and Exile is a collection of works from various writers that explore the literature of emigration and exile. These writers examine poetic, fictional, and biographical voices from settings such as Turkey, renaissance Italy, modern Spain, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, China, Canada, and elsewhere.
The Jacobean Spenserian poets, William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke represented themselves as a distinctive oppositional community in the years 1612 to 1625. The author examines the group's response to contemporary political events.
Using social theory and cultural analysis, Roger A. Salerno explores the relationship of abandonment to the construction of contemporary capitalistic cultures. Beginning with an array of narratives on the emergence of capitalism in the West and its undermining of traditional social institutions and structures, he provides an overview of both the definition of and reactions to abandonment, analyzing its historical, social, and psychological dimensions. The author contends that abandonment anxiety and feelings of estrangement not only have deep psychological roots, but also important social causes and cultural manifestations such as a quest for security or a hunger for commodities. Salerno surveys important contributions of writers, artists, philosophers, and social scientists and how their work expresses this sense of modern abandonment. He also examines how and why this phenomenon has become a central motif in renderings of community, the environment, and the process of globalization and presents a richer understanding of our modern social condition.
In an age of shifting social and political landscapes, there is one constant challenge individuals and groups have to face: that of internalizing the tension between the two opposing tendencies that rule the world today, homogenization and heterogenization. People transgress the limits of nationality, ethnicity, and culture in order to become citizens of the world, while at the same time longing for stability and certainty. Imagining Home: Exilic Reconstructions in Norma Manea and Andrei Codrescu’s Diasporic Narratives interprets the polymorphous development of two exiled writers’ identities, from the point of view of their “migrant” condition. Their restless, nomadic existence, perfectly reflected in the geographical territories mapped by the books under discussion, involves crossing boundaries, negotiating difference, and the colonizing imposition of a foreign culture. The outcome provides an insight into the concepts of Romanianness and Americanness, analysing them through the notions of alo-images and infra-images, while at the same time developing a context and a reading approach for Eastern European immigrant narratives.
Power in the Portrayal unveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period. Employing the methods of the new historical literary study in looking at a range of texts, Ross Brann reveals the paradoxical relations between the Andalusi Muslim and Jewish elites in an era when long periods of tolerance and respect were punctuated by outbreaks of tension and hostility. The examined Arabic texts reveal a fragmented perception of the Jew in eleventh-century al-Andalus. They depict seemingly contradictory figures at whose poles are an intelligent, skilled, and noble Jew deserving of homage a...
Looking to contexts ranging from premodern Spain and Italy to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, and America, the contributors to this volume explore the ways the political and intellectual aspirations of successive historical presents have repeatedly reshaped the forms and narratives of Jewish cultural memory.
The standard histories of Israeli literature limit the canon, virtually ignoring those who came to Israel from Jewish communities in the Middle East. By focusing on the work of Iraqi-born authors, this book offers a fundamental rethinking of the canon and of Israeli literary history. The story of these writers challenges common conceptions of exile and Zionist redemption. At the heart of this book lies the paradox that the dream of ingathering the exiles has made exiles of the ingathered. Upon arriving in Israel, these writers had to decide whether to continue writing in their native language, Arabic, or begin in a new language, Hebrew. The author reveals how Israeli works written in Arabic depict different memories of Iraq from those written in Hebrew. In addition, her analysis of the early novels of Hebrew writers set against the experience of "transit camps" (ma'abarot) argues for a re-evaluation of the significance of this neglected literary subgenre.
Explore the shock of the new—and the familiar—experienced by well-known expatriate writers when they returned to the United States. The migration of American artists and intellectuals to Europe in the early twentieth century has been amply documented and studied, but few scholars have examined the aftermath of their return home. Writing Back focuses on the memoirs of modernist writers and intellectuals who struggled with their return to America after years of living abroad. Susan Winnett establishes repatriation as related to but significantly different from travel and exile. She engages in close readings of several writers-in-exile, including Henry James, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, and Gertrude Stein. Writing Back examines how repatriation unsettles the self-construction of the “returning absentee” by challenging the fictions of national and cultural identity with which the writer has experimented during the time abroad. As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture.
Winner of the 2012 Best Book in the Humanities presented by the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association In the turbulent twentieth century, large numbers of Mexicans of all social classes faced crisis and catastrophe on a seemingly continuous basis. Revolution, earthquakes, industrial disasters, political and labor unrest, as well as indigenous insurgency placed extraordinary pressures on collective and individual identity. In contemporary literary studies, nonfiction literatures have received scant attention compared to the more supposedly "creative" practices of fictional narrative, poetry, and drama. In Documents in Crisis, Beth E. Jörgensen examines a selection of both canonical and lesser-known examples of narrative nonfiction that were written in response to these crises, including the autobiography, memoir, historical essay, testimony, chronicle, and ethnographic life narrative. She addresses the relative neglect of Mexican nonfiction in criticism and theory and demonstrates its continuing relevance for writers and readers who, in spite of the contemporary blurring of boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, remain fascinated by literatures of fact.