Literature In Exile Of East And Central Europe

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, Milos 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.

Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe is a collection of articles discussing authors whose homelands range from the former Soviet Union to the former Yugoslavia. For the purposes of this book, East and Central Europe comprise Russia, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Romania, and former Yugoslavia. These writers were exiled as a result of unbearable political climates - be it nations of the Communist block, including former Yugoslavia torn by its civil wars, or in the case of Poland, its partitioning by neighboring powers in the nineteenth century. No other book has collected such a variety of discussions from this geopolitical region, featuring authors who chose exile over the extinguishment of their individuality. Organized by theme and geography, this book will be of interest to a wide group of readers: from the topic of exile to research in Slavic (Czech, Polish, Russian, and post-Yugoslav), Romanian, German, and comparative literature. Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe is a valuable supplement to courses in Eastern and Central European history, as well as a primary text for courses in East and Central European literature.

Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought deals with the concept of exile on many levels—from the literal to the metaphorical. It combines analyses of predominantly Jewish authors of Central Europe of the twentieth century who are not usually connected, including Kafka, Kraus, Levi, Lustig, Wiesel, and Frankl. It follows the typical routes that exiled writers took, from East to West and later often as far as America. The concept and forms of exile are analyzed from many different points of view and great importance is devoted especially to the forms of inner exile. In Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought, Bronislava Volková, an exile herself and thus intimately familiar with the topic through her own experience, develops a unique typology of exile that will enrich the field of intellectual and literary history of twentieth-century Europe and America.

National literary histories based on internally homogeneous native traditions have significantly contributed to the construction of national identities, especially in multicultural East-Central Europe, the region between the German and Russian hegemonic cultural powers stretching from the Baltic states to the Balkans. History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, which covers the last two hundred years, reconceptualizes these literary traditions by de-emphasizing the national myths and by highlighting analogies and points of contact, as well as hybrid and marginal phenomena that traditional national histories have ignored or deliberately suppressed. The four volumes of the History configure the literatures from five angles: (1) key political events, (2) literary periods and genres, (3) cities and regions, (4) literary institutions, and (5) real and imaginary figures. The first volume, which includes the first two of these dimensions, is a collaborative effort of more than fifty contributors from Eastern and Western Europe, the US, and Canada.The four volumes of the History comprise the first volume in the new subseries on Literary Cultures.

Continuing the work undertaken in Vol. 1 of the History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, Vol. 2 considers various topographic sites—multicultural cities, border areas, cross-cultural corridors, multiethnic regions—that cut across national boundaries, rendering them permeable to the flow of hybrid cultural messages. By focusing on the literary cultures of specific geographical locations, this volume intends to put into practice a new type of comparative study. Traditional comparative literary studies establish transnational comparisons and contrasts, but thereby reconfirm, however inadvertently, the very national borders they play down. This volume inverts the expansive momentum of comparative studies towards ever-broader regional, European, and world literary histories. While the theater of this volume is still the literary culture of East-Central Europe, the contributors focus on pinpointed local traditions and geographic nodal points. Their histories of Riga, Plovdiv, Timişoara or Budapest, of Transylvania or the Danube corridor – to take a few examples – reveal how each of these sites was during the last two-hundred years a home for a variety of foreign or ethnic literary traditions next to the one now dominant within the national borders. By foregrounding such non-national or hybrid traditions, this volume pleads for a diversification and pluralization of local and national histories. A genuine comparatist revival of literary history should involve the recognition that “treading on native grounds” means actually treading on grounds cultivated by diverse people.

The East Central Europe in Exile series consists of two volumes which contain chapters written by both esteemed and renowned scholars, as well as young, aspiring researchers whose work brings a fresh, innovative approach to the study of migration. Altogether, there are thirty-eight chapters in both volumes focusing on the East Central European émigré experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first volume, Transatlantic Migrations, focuses on the reasons for emigration from the lands of East Central Europe; from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the intercontinental journey, as well as on the initial adaptation and assimilation processes. The second volume is slightly different in scope, for it focuses on the aspect of negotiating new identities acquired in the adopted homeland. The authors contributing to Transatlantic Identities focus on the preservation of the East Central European identity, maintenance of contacts with the “old country”, and activities pursued on behalf of, and for the sake of, the abandoned homeland. Combined, both volumes describe the transnational processes affecting East Central European migrants.

The studies in East and Central European History Writing in Exile 1939-1989 offer concise analysis of the organization and the intellectual work of historians exiled from the Baltic States, including Baltic Germans, Belorusia, Ukraine, and Poland in the West.