The Novel and Europe (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature)

This book examines the ways in which fiction has addressed the continent since the Second World War. Drawing on novelists from Europe and elsewhere, the volume analyzes the literary response to seven dominant concerns (ideas of Europe, conflict, borders, empire, unification, migration, and marginalization), offering a ground-breaking study of how modern and contemporary writers have participated in the European debate. The sixteen essays view the chosen writers, not as representatives of national literatures, but as participants in transcontinental discussion that has occurred across borders, cultures, and languages. In doing so, the contributors raise questions about the forms of power operating across and radiating from Europe, challenging both the institutionalized divisions of the Cold War and the triumphalist narrative of continental unity currently being written in Brussels. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction....Pages 1-52 Traumatic Europe: The Impossibility of Mourning in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz ....Pages 53-70 Ágota Kristóf’s Europe: (Un)Connectedness and (Non-)Belonging in The Third Lie ....Pages 71-83 Between Yearning and Aversion: Visions of Europe in Hilde Spiel’s The Darkened Room ....Pages 85-99 The European Origins of Albania in Ismail Kadare’s The File on H ....Pages 101-113 Images of Conquest: Europe and Latin American Identity....Pages 115-127 Sissie’s Odyssey: Literary Exorcism in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy ....Pages 129-142 European Fiction on the Borders: The Case of Herta Müller....Pages 143-160 Borders, Borderlands and Romani Identity in Colum McCann’s Zoli ....Pages 161-176 A Betrayal of Enlightenment: EU Expansion and Tõnu Õnnepalu’s Border State ....Pages 177-191 The Dilemmas of ‘Post-Communism’: Elizabeth Wilson’s The Lost Time Café ....Pages 193-209 Minorities and Migrants: Transforming the Swedish Literary Field....Pages 211-226 ‘My Dream Can Also Become Your Burden’: Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Poetics of Self-Determination....Pages 227-242 Blowing Hot and Cold: Georgia and the West....Pages 243-256 Becoming Black in Belgium: Chika Unigwe and the Social Construction of Blackness....Pages 257-270 Undivided Waters: Spatial and Translational Paradoxes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn ....Pages 271-286 Amara Lakhous’s Divorce Islamic Style: Muslim Connections in European Culture....Pages 287-300 Back Matter....Pages 301-361 Literary criticism has constituted the field of European literature in various ways: as a collection of national literatures; as a collection of canonical authors; and as a collection of canonical texts disseminated around Europe. This volume of essays tests an alternative approach to the topic. Taking Europe as the starting point of study, rather than texts or authors, Imagining the Continent in Contemporary Fiction explores ways in which literature has reflected on continental realities since 1945. Through a focus on fiction, contributors examine ideas and concerns arising from continent-wide experience, activity and identity which have traversed borders and circulated across Europe and beyond. In seeking to formulate a literature about Europe, the volume highlights intellectual relations between national literatures, drawing together a range of cultural heritages without suggesting cultural unity.