European Writers in Exile

Robert C. Hauhart, Jeff Birkenstein

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498560245
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

European Writers in Exile collects a series of original essays that address the writers' universal existential dilemma, when viewed through the lens of exile: who am I, where am I from, and what do I write, and to whom? While we often understand the term "exile" to refer to writers who have either been forced to leave their home country or region or chosen self-exile, this term need not be defined so narrowly, and the contributors to this volume explore a range of interesting and evolving definitions. Various countries in Europe have long been both a refuge for people and writers from many countries and a strife-torn region which has forced many to flee within the continent or beyond it. The phrase "in exile" involves writers moving across borders in multiple directions and for multiple reasons, including for reasons of duress or personal quest, and these themes are addressed and critiqued in these essays.

This volume naturally examines the cataclysmic and near-universal exilic experiences relating to the world wars, including essays on Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Additionally, essays address the unique early twentieth-century experiences of Emile Zola, Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, and James Joyce. More contemporary essay subjects include Milan Kundera, Norman Manea, Eva Hoffman, Caryl Phillips, and W. G. Sebald.


This collection of transnational, globalized European literature studies envisions understanding the intersection of our contemporary world and various writers in exile in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks. How does literary production in an increasingly globalized world—when seen from exile—affect a view back towards a country or region left behind? Or, conversely, how does exile push a writer to look outward to new (trans-)nationalized space(s)? These and other questions are important to investigate. Taken in sum, European Writers in Exile offers an academically rigorous, important, and cohesive volume.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: On the Experience of Exile
• 1 Social Exile in Nineteenth-Century England
• 2 Zola’s English Exile: The Private Pages of a Public Author
• 3 “All Europe contributed”: Joseph Conrad’s Experience and Representation of Exile
• 4 Thomas Mann—An American? From Fascination to Disillusionment: The Black Swan as a Literary Account of Mann’s Exile Experiences
• 5 James Joyce, Dubliners, and Exile: Exile by Any Other Name . . .
• 6 Franz Kafka’s Exile of the Mind
• 7 Professor Pnin in Exile: Nabokov and the Liminal Experience of the Postwar Émigré Academic
• 8 Specks in the City: Shklovsky and Nabokov in Berlin
• 9 Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: The Tradition of Political Thought and the Modern Age
• 10 Arthur Koestler’s Fictional Self-Reflections of Exile
• 11 In Search of the Doppelganger: Homecoming from Exile
• 12 Milan Kundera, the Novel, and the Problem of History
• 13 Norman Manea’s Exile between Predicament and Redemption
• 14 Lessons from Exile: Eva Hoffman as Theoretician and Practitioner of Otherness
• 15 “Receive me kindly, Stranger that I Am”: W. G. Sebald’s Existential Exile
• 16 Transnational Modes of Exile in Caryl Phillips’s Narratives: Or, What It Feels Like to Be Both Of and Not Of
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors