The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe

A Compendium

John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9783110217735
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110217742
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first comparative study of literature written by writers who fled from East-Central Europe during the twentieth century. It includes not only interpretations of individual lives and literary works, but also studies of the most important literary journals, publishers, radio programs, and other aspects of exile literary cultures. The theoretical part of introduction distinguishes between exiles, émigrés, and expatriates, while the historical part surveys the pre-twentieth-century exile traditions and provides an overview of the exilic events between 1919 and 1995; one section is devoted to exile cultures in Paris, London, and New York, as well as in Moscow, Madrid, Toronto, Buenos Aires and other cities. The studies focus on the factional divisions within each national exile culture and on the relationship between the various exiled national cultures among each other. They also investigate the relation of each exile national culture to the culture of its host country. Individual essays are devoted to Witold Gombrowicz, Paul Goma, Milan Kundera, Monica Lovincescu, Miloš Crnjanski, Herta Müller, and to the "internal exile" of Imre Kertész. Special attention is devoted to the new forms of exile that emerged during the ex-Yugoslav wars, and to the problems of "homecoming" of exiled texts and writers.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Exile: Home of the Twentieth Century
• Introduction
• In the Vacuum of Exile: The Hungarian Activists in Vienna 1919–1926
• Cosmopolitans without a Polis: Towards a Hermeneutics of the East-East Exilic Experience (1929–1945)
• Kultura (1946–2000)
• Polish World War II Veteran Émigré Writers in the US: Danuta Mostwin and Others
• Irodalmi Újság in Exile: 1957–1989
• The Hungarian Mikes Kör and Magyar Mühely: Personal Recollections
• “We did not want an émigré journal”: Pavel Tigrid and Svĕdectví
• Monica Lovinescu at Radio Free Europe
• Introduction
• Miloš Crnjanski in Exile
• Gombrowicz, the Émigré
• Paul Goma: the Permanence of Dissidence and Exile
• Writing and Internal Exile in Eastern Europe: The Example of Imre Kertész
• Kundera’s Paradise Lost: Paradigm of the Circle
• Introduction
• Life in Translation: Exile in the Autobiographical Works of Kazimierz Brandys and Andrzej Bobkowski
• From Diary to Novel: Sándor Márai’s San Gennaro vére and Ítélet Canudosban
• Exile Diaries: Sándor Márai, Gustaw Herling-Grudzin´ ski, and Others
• “Is There a Place Like Home?” Jewish Narratives of Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe
• Introduction
• Herta Müller: Between Myths of Belonging
• Post-Yugoslav Theater Exile: Transitory, Partial and Digital
• Losing Touch, Keeping in Touch, Out of Touch: The Reintegration of Hungarian Literary Exile after 1989
• Albert Wass: Rebirth and Apotheosis of a Transylvanian-Hungarian Writer
• Instead of Conclusion: East Central Literary Exile and its Representation
• A Timeline of Exile Movements, 1919–2000
• List of Contributors
• Backmatter