Everyday Life As Alternative Space In Exile Writing

This book is the first comparative study of the novels written by five German-speaking women - Anna Gmeyner, Selma Kahn, Hilde Spiel, Martina Wied and Hermynia Zur Mühlen - who had to flee National Socialist Central Europe. Gmeyner, Spiel, Wied and Zur Mühlen found refuge in Britain and thus added - together with male colleagues such as Stefan Zweig and Robert Neumann - an important but rarely investigated new dimension to the British literary landscape. The aim of this study is to reassess the women refugee writers' narrative strategies and integrate their work within feminist literary studies. The author investigates the five writers' narrativisation of everyday life, used to subvert the dominant discourse, and their portrayal of the intersection between class, racial and gender oppression. She also shows their innovative ways of picturing the gendered tension between the experiences of exile and exile as a modernist metaphor as well as their search for ways to refute the Nationalist Socialist rewriting of history. The book situates the novels within the theoretical discussions surrounding exile studies, social history and women's writing.

Exile and Gender I: Literature and the Press focuses on the work of exiled women writers and journalists and on gendered representations in the writing of both male and female exiled writers, examining the concepts of gender and sexuality in exile. The contributions are in English or German. Dieser Band Exile and Gender I: Literature and the Press enthält Beiträge zu den Werken exilierter Schriftstellerinnen und Journalistinnen und zu geschlechtsspezifischen Darstellungen in den Texten von Exilschriftstellern und Exilschriftstellerinnen, sowie zu Gender- und Sexualitätskonzepten. Die Beiträge sind entweder in deutscher oder englischer Sprache.

Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To expand scholarship on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple theaters of war, and on the many voices who contributed to, were affected by, and/or critiqued German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an interdisciplinary investigation, this volume explores select female-authored, German-language texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of World War I, or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to think about the intersection of nationalism, violence and gender and about the historical continuities and disruptions that shape such events.

How did social, cultural and political events concerning Britain during the 1940s reshape modern British fiction? During the Second World War and in its aftermath, British literature experienced and recorded drastic and decisive changes to old certainties. Moving from potential invasion and defeat to victory, the creation of the welfare state and a new Cold war threat, the pace of historical change seemed too rapid and monumental for writers to match. Consequently the 1940s were often side-lined in literary accounts as a dividing line between periods and styles. Drawing on more recent scholarship and research, this volume surveys and analyses this period's fascinating diversity, from novels of the Blitz and the Navy to the rise of important new voices with its contributors exploring the work of influential women, Commonwealth, exiled, genre, avant-garde and queer writers. A major critical re-evaluation of the intriguing decade, this book offers substantial chapters on Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and George Orwell as well as covering such writers as Jocelyn Brooke, Monica Dickens, James Hadley Chase, Patrick Hamilton, Gerald Kersh, Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Renault, Denton Welch and many others.

During the Nazi regime many children and young people in Europe found their lives uprooted by Nazi policies, resulting in their relocation around the globe. The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime represents the diversity of their experiences, covering a range of non-European perspectives on the Second World War and aspects of memory. This book is unique in that it places the experiences of children and youth in a transnational context, shifting the conversation of displacement and refuge to countries that have remained under-examined in a comparative context. Featuring essays from an international range of experts, this book analyses the key themes in three sections: the migration of children to countries including England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, and Brazil; the experiences of young people who remained in Nazi Europe and became victims of war, displacement and deportation; and finally the challenges of rebuilding lives and representing traumas in the aftermath of war. In its comparisons between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences and how these intersected and diverged, it revisits debates about cultural genocide through the separation of families and communities, as well as contributing new perspectives on forced labour, families and the Holocaust, and Germans as war victims.

New perspectives on the relationship - or the perceived relationship - between the German language and the causes, nature, and legacy of National Socialism and the Shoah.

Assessing the impact of fin-de-siècle Jewish culture on subsequent developments in literature and culture, this book is the first to consider the historical trajectory of Austrian-Jewish writing across the 20th century. It examines how Vienna, the city that stood at the center of Jewish life in the Austrian Empire and later the Austrian nation, assumed a special significance in the imaginations of Jewish writers as a space and an idea. The author focuses on the special relationship between Austrian-Jewish writers and the city to reveal a century-long pattern of living in tension with the city, experiencing simultaneously acceptance and exclusion, feeling “unheimlich heimisch” (eerily at home) in Vienna.

Ever since human beings first travelled, cities have constituted important material and literary destinations. While the city has formed a key theme for scholars of literary fiction, travellers’ modes of writing the city have been somewhat neglected by travel studies. However, travel writing with its attention to difference provides a rich source for the study of representational ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ in the modern city. Tracing spatial practices of French travel writers in London and New York from1851 to the 1980s, this book contributes to a body of work that analyses travel and travel writing beyond the Anglophone context, and engages a variety of travel writing in questions surrounding French modalities for negotiating and establishing a nexus of meanings for life in the modern city. One of the central tenets of the book is that, in the way its spaces are planned, encountered and represented, the city is operational in the formulation of identities and ideologies, and the book’s guiding question is how travel and travel writing allow for the exploration of urban modernity from a perspective of exchange. Bringing together the strands of theory, context and poetic analysis, this book examines travel writing as a spatial practice of the modern city, engaging urban space in questions of nationality, power and legibility and opening avenues for the exploration of urban modernity from a position of alterity, where alternative imaginative geographies of the city might emerge.