Our globalised world is shaped by migration, with large numbers of individuals and groups or even nations on the move. Stable concepts of home and belonging have become the exception rather than the rule. Academic engagements with diaspora, too, have long attended more to the notion of dispersal rather than settlement. This book widens the traditional focus of diaspora studies by extending it to the diasporic construction of home and belonging.
Exploring the significance of symbolic representation, this volume delves into its role in diaspora studies through various artistic and critical lenses. Contributors analyze symbols from diverse contexts, including Shakespeare and Bollywood, to understand their impact on diasporic identity and representation. The collection emphasizes a transdisciplinary approach, integrating insights from social anthropology, history, and literature, while refining the theoretical frameworks of diaspora studies. This dialogue seeks to highlight both conscious and unconscious symbols that shape academic discourse in the field.
(Mis-)readings of the stars and our place in the cosmos have long been used as a metaphor for reading fictional worlds: to speak of ‘reading into the stars’ is to acknowledge that the stargazer instils the otherwise empty sidereal text with meaning of their own making. By contrasting this activity with novel-reading, the trope of astro-eisegesis raises questions about the nature, potential, and functions of fiction. This amounts to a self-reflexive cosmopoetics of the novel employed by authors such as Martin Amis, John Banville, Andrew Crumey, Zadie Smith, and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. Tracing the development of the trope in narrative fictions since Chaucer and its uses in British and Irish novels since the Apollo moon landings, the book explores the epistemological, ontological and anthropological dimensions of novelistic cosmopoetics.
„And is it possible that an Englishman. can find such liking in that barbarous rudeness that he should forget his own nature and forgo his own nation?“ - Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, c. 1596 With striking frequency, Elizabethan writings on Ireland refer to the past in order to explain the troublesome present: even at this early point, the 'Irish problem' was perceived as a historical one. The book examines English representations of history written in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, both in Ireland and England. It explores in how far the colonial situation in Ireland, and the historical dimension it was viewed in, prompted and influenced the reflection on 'Englishness' and its historical forms.
Krisendiskurse im Blick der Literatur
Europa ist in der Krise, aber wann war es das nicht? Die Beiträge in diesem Band untersuchen die Rolle der Literatur bei der Imagination und Figuration Europas als Produkt von und Lösung für Krisen. Seit Ovid in den Metamorphosen vom Raub der phönizischen Königstochter Europa durch den als Stier getarnten Zeus erzählte, hat der europäische Kontinent einen krisenhaften literarischen Gründungsmythos. Vom Rolandslied bis zum politischen Essay über den Kiewer Maidan, von der Bühne Shakespeares bis zum spanischen Gegenwartstheater wird Europa seither von der Krise her gedacht. Der fächerübergreifende Sammelband diskutiert die Rolle der Literatur als Reflexionsmedium für die Konstruktion der kulturellen wie der politischen Idee von Europa vor dem Hintergrund historischer und aktueller ökonomischer, politischer, religiöser und militärischer Krisen.