The Novel and Europe

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.

Introduction, Andrew Hammond.- 1   Traumatic Europe: The Impossibility of Mourning in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Theodore Koulouris.- 2   Ágota Kristóf’s Europe: (Un)Connectedness and (Non)Belonging in The Third Lie, Metka Zupancic.- 3   Between Yearning and Aversion: Visions of Europe in Hilde Spiel’s The Darkened Room, Christoph Parry.- 4   The European Origins of Albania in Ismail Kadare’s The File on H, Peter Morgan.- 5   Images of Conquest: Europe and Latin American Identity, Peter Beardsell.- 6   Sissie’s Odyssey: Literary Exorcism in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, Esther Pujolràs-Noguer.- 7   European Fiction on the Borders: The Case of Herta Müller, Marcel Cornis-Pope and Andrew Hammond.- 8   Borders, Borderlands and Romani Identity in Colum McCann’s Zoli, Mihaela Moscaliuc.- 9   A Betrayal of Enlightenment: EU Expansion and Tõnu Õnnepalu’s Border State, Gordana P. Crnkovic.- 10  The Dilemmas of ‘Post-Communism’: Elizabeth Wilson’s The Lost Time Café, Andrew Hammond.- 11  Minorities and Migrants: Transforming the Swedish Literary Field, Anne Heith.- 12  ‘My Dream Can Also Become Your Burden’: Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s Poetics of Self-Determination, Guido Snel.- 13  Blowing Hot and Cold: Georgia and the West, Donald Rayfield.- 14  Becoming Black in Belgium: Chika Unigwe and the Social Construction of Blackness, Sarah de Mul.- 15  Undivided Waters: Spatial and Translational Paradoxes in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s The Bridge of the Golden Horn, Gizem Arslan.- 16  Amara Lakhous’s Divorce Islamic Style: Muslim Connections in European Culture, Daniele Comberiati.- Bibliography.- Index

Andrew Hammond is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Brighton, UK. His research interests are Cold War fiction, twentieth-century British fiction, postcolonial writing and theory, and cross-cultural representation. Previous publications include British Fiction and the Cold War (2013), Global Cold War Literature (editor, 2012), and British Literature and the Balkans (2010).