Overview

Using works by Hafid Bouazza, Najat El Hachmi, Tsjêbbe Hettinga, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Leïla Slimani, Zadie Smith, and Kjell Westö, this book looks at post-national feelings of belonging in contemporary European literature. In their literary work and authorship, these authors turn to imagine larger worlds, within and beyond Europe, to escape the confinements of the national and to imagine communities created through connections and solidarities they choose to sustain. This book analyses issues of voice, representation, history, memory, home, and cross-cultural solidarity in these authors’ novels, stories, and poetry, finding attempts to shape literary worlds that escape the trappings of Europe’s history and sustain into an uncertain future. In its innovative combination of perspectives from world literature, minority studies, and European studies, and reading across seven languages and cultures, this book shows the many worlds of European literature. Through exploring how these writers negotiate identity, borders, and culture in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, this book makes visible a Europe in which identities can once again be defined outside the borders of the national.

Full Product Details

9781350595194

Table of Contents

Reviews

Post National Worlds in Contemporary European Literature is a groundbreaking and indispensable work for anyone interested in how today’s literary landscapes reimagine the ideas of nation and globalization—actively reshaping what Europe means, for whom, and in which voices. Jesse van Amelsvoort demonstrates that literature—across languages and borders––continues to be a vital space for negotiating identities and belonging, and for envisioning new communities and connections. By weaving together minority studies, world literature, and European studies, this book reveals how post-national literary scenarios emerge not in spite of Europe’s linguistic and cultural fractures but through them, and are compelling reconfigurations of the European project itself. This is world literature grounded in lived multiplicity—rooted, relational, and politically urgent. A timely and necessary intervention. * Nicoletta Pireddu, Georgetown University, USA * Written with clarity and verve, Post-National Worlds in Contemporary European Literature brings us closer to an actual Europe of today. By reading works in multiple languages from Finland, Spain, UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany, Jesse van Amelsvoort deftly explores ways of imagining community and agency beyond the nation, ethnicity and glib ideological notions of ‘Europe’. Fully up-to-date theoretically, the book demonstrates in this way the fundamental significance of literature in creating modes of belonging in a changing world. * Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University, Sweden *

This groundbreaking study reshapes what Europe means—by whom, for whom, and in which voices. Grounding world literature in a rooted, relational multiplicity, it shows how post-national writers—multilingual, minor, and mobile––reimagine identity, community, and belonging on their own terms. A timely and necessary intervention into the future of European literatures and their global entanglements. * Nicoletta Pireddu, Georgetown University, USA *

Author Information

Jesse van Amelsvoort is Lecturer in Modern European Literature at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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