The Bloomsbury Handbook of Anglophone Literature and Migration

Critical and Creative Voices (1946-2016)

Nicoletta Vallorani, Simona Bertacco, William Boelhower

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765103548
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Focusing on a significant 70-year period as a climactic phase of displacement, the book investigates the role of literature in producing new modes of representing and understanding migration in a global context.

Globally felt and reported as a geographical, sociological, anthropological, and historical phenomenon, migration has produced an unprecedented corpus of literary narratives that demands to be approached through its own set of cross-disciplinary critical approaches. This Handbook explores tales of migration via a systematic study of the large corpus of Anglophone literary texts that have been written by migrant authors and/or on the topic of migration between 1946 and 2016-from the start of the United Nations International Migration Report to the first year in which the number of displaced people reached the level of the Second World War, marking a new phase in global migrations.

Given the dominance of English as a world language, often used by writers who are not native speakers, the volume covers Anglophone writing, providing a substantially representative corpus that includes texts from or about Europe, Africa, North and Central America, and the South Asia and Pacific region. Starting from a critical approach that is inherently interdisciplinary, authors consider the notion of the border and how it has changed over time; show how traditional literary genres have morphed and hybridized to become suitable expressive tools for the new stories of migration; reflect on how the movement across borders and countries creates migrant identities that are not only linguistic but invests all aspects of one's life and worldview; and includes authors' voices (a small but representative group) to both justify and test the critical approaches proposed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Nicoletta Vallorani, Simona Bertacco, and William Boelhower
• Part I Survey of the Discipline: An Introduction
• Part II Borders and Spaces: An Introduction
• Part III Hybrid Forms and Texts: An Introduction
• Part IV Language, Identity, Belonging: An Introduction
• Part V Author’s Voices: An Introduction
• References
• Index
• Imprint