Abstract
The following collection of essays will explore the ways in which Europe has been debated in post-1945 fiction. The emphasis will be on responses to the historical conditions of the continent from the Second World War to the twenty-first century as displayed by a wide range of novelists from Europe and elsewhere. While recognising that many authors still function within the specificities of national cultures, the collection will focus on texts that explore areas of experience, belief, activity and identity which have traversed national borders and circulated through Europe and beyond, highlighting the intellectual relations between heterogeneous literary traditions and emphasising the intercontinental roots of the European imaginary. At the heart of the collection will be an interest in the literary (de)construction of Europe and Europeanness. Influenced by the work of Bo Stråth, Gerard Delanty, Luisa Passerini, Zygmunt Bauman, Étienne Balibar and others, the volume will examine Europe not only as a construct under continual revision but also as one that literature has occasionally helped to forge. At the same time, it will analyse the lived experiences of social and political transformation shared by eastern and western populations, as well as the accelerated modernity, globalisation and geopolitical conflict affecting the wider world. In doing so, the essays will raise questions about the forms of power operating across and radiating from Europe, challenging both the institutionalised divisions of the Cold War and the triumphalist narrative of continental unity currently being written in Brussels.
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Notes
- 1.
Casanova, ‘European Literature: Simply a Higher Degree of Universality?’, in Theo D’haen and Iannis Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe? (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), p. 15. For Anderson’s discussion of the ‘imagined community’, see Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new edn (1983; London and New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 5–7.
- 2.
Quoted in Elaine Rusinko, Straddling Borders: Literature and Identity in Subcarpathian Rus’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 131.
- 3.
Casanova, ‘European Literature’, p. 20. ‘Literary studies […] still have not come up with a true theory of European literature’, Ottmar Ette writes: ‘in fact, they haven’t even noticed that such a theory is currently missing’ (Ette, ‘European Literature(s) in the Global Context: Literatures for Europe’, in D’haen and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?, p. 155).
- 4.
Lavrin, Studies in European Literature (London: Constable and Co., 1929), p. 58.
- 5.
See Croce’s European Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1924), Curtius’s Essays on European Literature (1950), Weigand’s Critical Probings: Essays in European Literature (1982), Boyle and Swales’s edited Realism in European Literature (1986), Hewitt’s edited The Culture of Reconstruction (1989) and Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel (1997). Similar shortcomings are found in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Herbert Lindenberger and Egon Schwarz’s edited Essays on European Literature (1972), Edward Timms and David Kelley’s edited Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (1985), Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch’s Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature (1987), Peter Collier and Judy Davies’s edited Modernism and the European Unconscious (1990) and David Jasper and Colin Crowder’s European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century (1990).
- 6.
Gaskell, Landmarks in European Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 1.
- 7.
Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, ‘Introduction’ to Juraga and Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment (Westport and London: Praeger, 2002), p. 5.
- 8.
William Edgerton, ‘Russian Literature’, in Bédé and Edgerton, eds, Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, new edn (1947; New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 702.
- 9.
Lubonja, ‘Between the Local and the Universal’, in Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe: What is European about the Literature of Europe?, new edn (2003; Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004), p. 201.
- 10.
Nooteboom, ‘My Ten Most European Experiences’, in Christopher Joyce, ed., Questions of Identity: A Selection from the Pages of New European (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 134.
- 11.
This is not to say that the more exclusivist approach is not continuing. Pericles Lewis’s edited The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism (2011) offers only a chapter on the literatures of eastern Europe, while Michael Bell’s edited The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists (2012) and Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wells’s edited Digressions in European Literature (2011) make barely any reference to them.
- 12.
Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), p. ix; Travers, ‘Preface’ to Travers, ed., European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), p. xiii.
- 13.
Keller, ‘Writing Europe’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 8. ‘It matters little whether they are reading in the east or in the west or how they feel about Europe’, Keller continues: ‘as European authors they are embedded in a cultural context that shapes and contributes to their texts and that they, as writers, continue to mould through their texts’ (ibid., p. 9).
- 14.
Velikić, ‘B-Europe’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 342.
- 15.
Özdamar, ‘Guest Faces’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 229.
- 16.
D’haen, ‘Introduction’ to D’haen and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?, p. 5.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 7. Dubravka Ugrešić had already derided such aims, commenting scathingly on notions of European literature moulded by ‘EU politicians’ as much as by ‘old-fashioned university departments’ (Ugrešić, ‘European Literature as a Eurovision Song Contest’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 327).
- 18.
Nooteboom, ‘Ten Most European Experiences’, p. 129.
- 19.
For an excellent survey of migrant and diasporic writers in Europe, see Daniela Merolla and Sandra Ponzanesi, ‘Introduction’ to Ponzanesi and Merolla, eds, Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 20–34.
- 20.
Ugrešić, ‘European Literature’, p. 332.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 333.
- 22.
As critics have argued, ‘diasporic or transcultural processes which have conditioned the lives of millions of people in Europe have made it almost impossible to connect their identity to a specific and unitary location. In this context, the question “who am I?” needs to be asked not only in connection to one’s roots which are often found in different continents, but also in relation to one’s routes’ (Lourdes López Ropero and Alejandra Moreno Álvarez, ‘Multiculturalism in a Selection of English and Spanish Fiction and Artworks’, in Sandra Ponzanesi and Bolette B. Blaagaard, eds, Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 93).
- 23.
Merolla and Ponzanesi, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. It should be said that even the best criticism on the European theme suffers from a lack of inclusivity, either overlooking post-colonial writing from other continents or marginalising eastern European writing.
- 24.
See Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977), Adnan’s Paris, When It’s Naked (1993), Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) and Endo’s Ryugaku (Foreign Studies, 1965).
- 25.
Kulenović, Natural History of a Disease, trans. by Amila Karahasanović (1994; Sarajevo: Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2012), p. 75.
- 26.
Quoted in Michael Wintle, ‘Europe’s Image: Visual Representations of Europe from the Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century’, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity in Europe: Perceptions of Divergence and Unity in Past and Present Times (Aldershot and Brookfield: Avebury, 1996), p. 52; Kevin Wilson, ‘Introduction to Book 1’, in Wilson and Jan van der Dussen, The History of the Idea of Europe, new edn (1993; Milton Keynes: The Open University; London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 11.
- 27.
Quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Catching the Wrong Bus?’, in Peter Gowan and Perry Anderson, eds, The Question of Europe (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 119; Ash, ‘Catching the Wrong Bus?’, p. 120; Joll, Europe: A Historian’s View (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1969), p. 5; Hobsbawm, ‘The Curious History of Europe’, in Hobsbawm, On History, new edn (1997; London: Abacus, 1998), p 229. As further examples, Hugh Seton-Watson argues that ‘[t]here have been and are many different Europes’, while Norman Davies illustrates his belief that the parameters of Europe ‘have always remained open to debate’ with a literary reference: ‘In 1794, when William Blake published one of his most unintelligible poems entitled “Europe: A Prophecy”, he illustrated it with a picture of the Almighty leaning out of the heavens holding a pair of compasses’ (quoted in Kevin Wilson, ‘General Preface to “What is Europe”’, in Wilson and van der Dussen, eds, History, p. 8; Davies, Europe: A History, new edn (1996; London: Pimlico, 1997), p. 8).
- 28.
Laxness, The Fish Can Sing, trans. by Magnus Magnusson (1957; London: The Harvill Press, 2001), p. 169.
- 29.
See W.H. Parker, ‘Europe: How Far?’, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 126, No. 3 (1960), pp. 281–4.
- 30.
Oscar Halecki and Gonzague de Reynold quoted in ibid., p. 289. Feeling that ‘Eurasia’ privileges the smaller portion of the landmass, Joseph Brodsky suggests that the term ‘Asiopa’ is more representative of the true ratio of Asia and Europe (Brodsky, ‘Democracy’, Granta, Vol. 30 (1990), p. 200).
- 31.
Grøndahl, ‘Notes of an Escapist’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 127; Toíbín, ‘The Future of Europe’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 311.
- 32.
Quoted in Norman Davies, Europe East and West, new edn (2006; London: Pimlico, 2007), p. 10.
- 33.
Quoted in Wintle, ‘Europe’s Image’, p. 55.
- 34.
Tommy Wieringa, Caesarion, trans. by Sam Garrett (2007; London: Portobello Books, 2012), p. 41; Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women, trans. by John Fletcher (2009; London: MacLehose Press, 2012), p. 253; Tim Parks, Europa, new edn (1997; London: Vintage, 1998), p. 5.
- 35.
Parks, Europa, pp. 26, 100.
- 36.
The six original members were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. These were joined by Britain, Denmark and Ireland in 1973, by Greece in 1981, by Portugal and Spain in 1986 and by Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. In the twenty-first century, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined in 2004, Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007 and Croatia joined in 2013.
- 37.
Nikolaidis, The Son, trans. by Will Firth (2006; London: Istros Books, 2013), p. 78; Õnnepalu (Emil Tode), ‘Europe, a Blot of Ink’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 305. As a Czech diplomat lamented, ‘[w]hat can we do? If we want to become members of the Union, we have to accept what is decided’ (Václav Kuklik quoted in Charlotte Bretherton, ‘Security Issues in the Wider Europe: The Role of EU-CEEC Relations’, in Mike Mannin, ed., Pushing Back the Boundaries: The European Union and Central and Eastern Europe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 200).
- 38.
Penkov, ‘Cross Thieves’, in Penkov, East of the West, new edn (2011; London: Sceptre, 2011), p. 136. In a jointly authored novel, Garros and Evdokimov lament the transformation of eastern Europe into ‘presentable euro-standard euro-real estate’, while Perišić condemns a neoliberal Croatia in which ‘all our banks were sold to foreigners’ (Garros-Evdokimov, Headcrusher, trans. by Andrew Bromfield (2003; London: Vintage, 2006), p. 58; Perišić, Our Man in Iraq, trans. by Will Firth (2007; London: Istros Books, 2012), pp. 137–8). Perhaps the most powerful critique was expressed via the faux naiveté of one of Etel Adnan’s novels: ‘Europe knows what it’s doing’, she wrote in the year of Maastricht: ‘The new Europe will settle every possible question’ (Adnan, Paris, When It’s Naked (Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 1993), pp. 22, 28).
- 39.
Bo Stråth, ‘Multiple Europes: Integration, Identity and Demarcation to the Other’, in Stråth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2000), p. 419; David Wills, ‘When East Goes West: The Political Economy of European Re-Integration in the Post-Cold War Era’, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p. 158.
- 40.
See Sandra Lavenex, ‘EU External Governance in “Wider Europe”’, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2004), pp. 680–700.
- 41.
See Karis Muller, ‘Shadows of Empire in the European Union’, The European Legacy, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2001), pp. 439–51.
- 42.
Weldon, Darcy’s Utopia, new edn (1990; London: Flamingo, 1991), p. 250. The antipathy has often shown up in the Euro-baromètre, the European Commission’s survey of public opinion: see Jack Citrin and John Sides, ‘More than Nationals: How Identity Choice Matters in the New Europe’, in Richard K. Herrmann, Thomas Risse and Marilynn B. Brewer, eds, Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 165–9; Michael Bruter, Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 134–9; and David Dunkerley, Lesley Hodgson, Stanisław Konopacki, Tony Spybey and Andrew Thompson, Changing Europe: Identities, Nations and Citizens (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 120–5.
- 43.
Jacques Delors once said that ‘[y]ou don’t fall in love with a common market; you need something else’ and Jean Monnet is supposed to have remarked that ‘if the European construction process had to be started again afresh, it would be better to start with culture’ (quoted in Jeremy MacClancy, ‘The Predicable Failure of a European Identity’, in Barrie Axford, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity in the New Europe (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 112; quoted in François Nectoux, ‘European Identity and the Politics of Culture in Europe’, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity, p. 149).
- 44.
Quoted in Nectoux, ‘European Identity’, p. 150.
- 45.
Barrie Axford, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, ‘Analysing Unity and Diversity in the New Europe’, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity, p. 21.
- 46.
See Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 56–60.
- 47.
Frykman, ‘Belonging in Europe: Modern Identities in Minds and Places’, Peter Niedermüller and Bjarne Stoklund, eds, Europe: Cultural Construction and Reality (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001), p. 15.
- 48.
Pollen, ‘On the European Ingredient in the Text (With a Sidelong Glance at an Eel in a Bathtub)’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 236.
- 49.
For the definitions and origins of these concepts, see Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 28–39.
- 50.
Wallace, ‘Where Does Europe End? Dilemmas of Inclusion and Exclusion’, in Jan Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 79.
- 51.
Cărtărescu, ‘Europe Has the Shape of My Brain’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 63.
- 52.
Quoted in Iver B. Neumann, ‘From the USSR to Gorbachev to Putin: Perestroika as a Failed Excursion from “the West” to “Europe” in Russian Discourse’, in Mikael af Malmborg and Bo Stråth, eds, The Meaning of Europe: Variety and Contention within and among Nations (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), p. 194.
- 53.
Kundera, ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ (1983, trans. by Edmund White), The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, pp. 33, 34 (Kundera’s italics).
- 54.
Ibid., pp. 37, 34. As David Williams remarks, Kundera’s constructions of Central Europe have ‘seen him taken to task by postcolonial scholars for “othering” Russia and attempting to hang a new Iron Curtain further to the east’ (Williams, Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 22–3).
- 55.
See Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, ‘Facing the “Desert of Tartars”: The Eastern Border of Europe’, in Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound, p. 51; and Ash, ‘Where Is Central Europe Now?’, in Ash, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 388.
- 56.
Topol, City Sister Silver, trans. by Alex Zucker (1994; North Haven: Catbird Press, 2000), p. 390; Rakusa, ‘Impressions and Conversations during the Intervals’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 27; Karahasan, ‘Europe Writes in Time’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 188.
- 57.
Wintle, ‘Introduction: Cultural Diversity and Identity in Europe’, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p. 17.
- 58.
Schindel, ‘“We’re All Right”: Europe’s Influence on My Writings’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, pp. 254–5.
- 59.
Indeed, isolationism could be said to be as important a theme of European literature as integrationism. For example, authors have referred to Portugal and its capital, particularly under Salazar, as ‘[t]he fringe of Europe’, as ‘the last city in Europe’ and as ‘EUROPE’S BEST-KEPT SECRET’ (Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story, trans. by Ina Rilke (1991; London: Harvill, 1993), p. 39; Jens Christian Grøndahl, Silence in October, trans. by Anne Born (1998; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000), p. 264; José Cardoso Pires, Ballad of Dogs’ Beach: Dossier of a Crime, trans. by Mary Fitton (1982; London and Melbourne: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1986), p. 3).
- 60.
Péter Nádas, ‘In the Intimacy of Literary Writing’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 214; Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe, new edn (2005; London: Atlanta Books, 2011), p. 181; Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness, trans. by Nicholas de Lange (2002; London: Vintage, 2005), p. 2; Ognjen Spahić, Hansen’s Children, trans. by Will Firth (2004; Bristol: Istros Books, 2011), p. 39; Agate Nesaule, In Love with Jerzy Kosinski (Madison: Terrace Books, 2009), p. 112.
- 61.
de Rougemont, The Meaning of Europe, trans. by Alan Braley (1962; London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965), p. 12.
- 62.
White, ‘The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity’, in Stråth, ed., Europe, p. 67.
- 63.
Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies (1966; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 95; Taher, Sunset Oasis, trans. by Humphrey Davies (2007; London: Sceptre, 2010), p. 37; Grøndhal, ‘Notes of an Escapist’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 128. See also Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and Sahgal’s Rich Like Us (1985).
- 64.
Said, Culture and Imperialism, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994), p. xix.
- 65.
Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815–1960 (London: Fontana, 1982), p. 208.
- 66.
White, ‘Discourse of Europe’, p. 68.
- 67.
Favell, ‘Immigration, Migration, and Free Movement in the Making of Europe’, in Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein, eds, European Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 167.
- 68.
See Roland Hsu, ‘The Ethnic Question: Premodern Identity for a Postmodern Europe?’, in Hsu, ed., Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 2; and Peter A. Poole, Europe Unites: The EU’s Eastern Enlargement (Westport: Praeger, 2003), p. 153. This is not to discount intra-European migration: as the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck once wrote, ‘Europe’s peoples, with or without wars, had always crisscrossed the continent, intermixing and seeking out new homes whenever their one bit of land produced too little or life became unbearable’ (Erpenbeck, The End of Days, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (2012; London: Portobello Books, 2014), p. 50).
- 69.
Quoted in Graham Huggan, ‘Perspectives on Postcolonial Europe’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2008), p. 243.
- 70.
Quoted in Sandra Ponzanesi and Bolette B. Blaagaard, ‘Introduction: In the Name of Europe’, in Ponzanesi and Blaagaard, eds, Deconstructing Europe, p. 3. In 1990, the Italian writer Umberto Eco was already claiming that African migration was of greater significance for Europe than the dismantling of the Iron Curtain (see Sidonie Smith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler, ‘Introduction’ to Brinker-Gabler and Smith, eds, Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 6).
- 71.
Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. by James Swenson (2001; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. x, 39 (Balibar’s italics).
- 72.
Ponzanesi and Blaagaard, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.
- 73.
This does not discount the involvement of other European empires. For example, at the Congress of Berlin (1878) decisions taken collectively by the Great Powers created what one British politician termed ‘a kind of protectorate’ in parts of south-east Europe (Lord Palmerston quoted in A.L. Macfie, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923 (London and New York: Longman, 1989), p. 22).
- 74.
Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle: or The Days of the Consuls, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth and Bogdan Rakić (1945; London: The Harvill Press, 1996), p. 68.
- 75.
See Moore, ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1 (2001), p. 115.
- 76.
Amongst the colonised or disputed territories are Greenland, Northern Ireland, the Faroe Islands, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira, Ceuta, Melilla, Gibraltar, northern Cyprus, Akrotiri, Dhekelia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya and Abkhazia.
- 77.
Anthony Pagden, ‘Introduction’ to Pagden, ed., Facing Each Other: The World’s Perception of Europe and Europe’s Perception of the World (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2000), p. xviii. According to this discourse, Albert Memmi writes, ‘the whole world […] fell into two. In the upper part of the globe were the peoples of the North, orderly, clean, controlled and self-sure, wielders of political and technical power; while lower down were the peoples of the South, noisy and vulgar’ (Memmi, Strangers, trans. by Brian Rhys (1955; New York: The Orion Press, 1960), pp. 128–9).
- 78.
Enzensberger, Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent, trans. by Martin Chalmers (1987; New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), pp. 77, 76.
- 79.
In a study of race and racism in Europe, the British-Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips concludes by saying that ‘Europe must begin to restructure the tissue of lies that continues to be taught and digested at school and at home for we, black people, are an inextricable part of this small continent’ (Phillips, The European Tribe, new edn (1987; London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 129).
- 80.
Neziraj, The Demolition of the Eiffel Tower (Tragicomedy of the Absurd for Four Actors), trans. by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck, Albanian Literature, http://www.albanianliterature.net/authors_modern2/neziraj_drama.html (accessed 24 July 2015).
- 81.
See John M. Hobson, ‘Revealing the Cosmopolitan Side of Oriental Europe: The Eastern Origins of European Civilisation’, in Gerard Delanty, ed., Europe and Asia beyond East and West (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 108.
- 82.
Eberhard Bort, ‘Illegal Migration and Cross-Border Crime: Challenges at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union’, in Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound, p. 204; Joep Leerssen, ‘Europe from the Balkans’, in Michael Wintle, ed., Imagining Europe: Europe and European Civilisation as Seen from Its Margins [etc.] (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2008), p. 120; Sorin Antohi, ‘Habits of the Mind: Europe’s Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies’, in Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds, Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), p. 69.
- 83.
Quoted in Charles Briffa, The Essential Oliver Friggieri: National Author of Malta (Msida: Malta University Publishing, 2012), p. 386.
- 84.
As Matti Bunzl points out, the physical border is reinforced by racial, religious and ethnic prejudices, which are now as much ‘a means of fortifying Europe’ as a means of expanding Europe abroad (Bunzl, ‘Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2005), p. 502).
- 85.
See Peter Andreas, ‘Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-First Century’, International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2003), p. 78.
- 86.
Newman, ‘On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework’, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2003), p. 14.
- 87.
Perry Anderson, ‘The Europe to Come’, in Gowan and Anderson, eds, Question of Europe, p. 141.
- 88.
Lewycka, Two Caravans, new edn (2007; London: Penguin, 2008), p. 157.
- 89.
Pieterse, ‘Fictions of Europe’, Race & Class, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1991), p. 5.
- 90.
Quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2004), p. 21.
- 91.
Verhulst, Problemski Hotel, trans. by David Colmer (2003; London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2005), p. 74.
- 92.
For examples, see Wintle, ‘Introduction’, p. 21; Bauman, Europe, pp. 73–4; Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 119; and David Willis, ‘When East Goes West: The Political Economy of European Re-Integration in the Post-Cold War Era’, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p. 149.
- 93.
Quoted in Hannelore Scholz, ‘“Life from Its Very Beginning at Its End”: The Unhomely Boundaries in the Works of Bulgarian Author Blaga Dimitrova’, in Brinker-Gabler and Smith, eds, Writing New Identities, p. 256. Of equal relevance is the comment by Hungarian novelist György Konrád that ‘our brains have been cut in half by the armistice line separating East and West’ (Konrád, The City Builder, trans. by Ivan Sanders (1977; Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), p. 68).
- 94.
Ash, ‘Catching the Wrong Bus?’, pp. 120–1.
- 95.
Ash, ‘Where Is Central Europe Now?’, p. 396.
- 96.
Habermas and Derrida, ‘Feb. 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Pleas for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe’, in Daniel Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey, eds, Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 6.
- 97.
Quoted in Holly Case, ‘Being European: East and West’, in Checkel and Katzenstein, eds, European Identity, pp. 112–13.
- 98.
Casanova, ‘European Literature’, p. 20.
- 99.
Wachtel, Remaining Relevant, p. 124; Palavestra, ‘Literature as Criticism of Ideology in Contemporary Serbian Culture’, in Celia Hawkesworth, ed., Literature and Politics in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 11, 11.
- 100.
For examples from the 1930s, see Miroslav Krleža’s Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (The Return of Philip Latinowicz, 1932), Georges Bataille’s Le Bleu du Ciel (Blue of Noon, 1957; composed 1935), Albert Camus’s La Mort heureuse (A Happy Death, 1971; composed 1936–8), Irmgard Keun’s Kind aller Länder (Child of All Nations, 1938) and Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1939).
- 101.
For further examples, see Jean-Paul Sartre’s Le Sursis (The Reprieve, 1945), Primo Levi’s La Chiave a Stella (The Wrench, 1978), Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005), Alessandro Gallenzi’s Interrail (2012), Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe (2005) and Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008). On occasion, transcontinental narratives are able to discuss continent-wide issues by utilising only several locations: see Dubravka Ugrešić’s Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004), Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoiren eines Antisemiten (Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, 1979) and Cees Nooteboom’s In Nederland (In the Dutch Mountains, 1984).
- 102.
Of course, modernisation was a theme in European literature long before 1945. For example, see Heðin Brú’s Feðgar á Ferð (The Old Man and His Sons, 1940), Andrey Platonov’s Dzhan (Soul, 1935) and Kurban Said’s great meditation on East-West division, Ali und Nino (Ali and Nino, 1937).
- 103.
For anthems, see José Saramago, Death at Intervals, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (2005; London: Vintage, 2008), p. 54; for languages, see Nooteboom, Following Story, p. 28; for currencies, see Parks, Europa, p. 68; for salaries, see Heinrich Böll, The End of a Mission, trans. by Leila Vennewitz (1966; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 71; for radio stations, see Richard Stern, Europe: Or Up and Down with Schreiber and Baggish, new edn (1961; Evanston: TriQuarterly Books, 2007), p. 51; for television, see Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul, new edn (2007; London: Penguin, 2008), pp. 282–3; for city centres, see Kjartan Fløgstad, Dollar Road, trans. by Nadia Christensen (1977; Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 120–1; for train networks, see Louis Armand, Clair Obscur (Vokovice: Equus, 2011), p. 58; for tram networks, see Anita Konkka, A Fool’s Paradise, trans. by A.D. Haun and Owen Witesman (1988; Normal and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006), p. 21; for weather systems, see Stefan Chwin, Death in Danzig, trans. by Philip Boehm (1995; London: Vintage, 2006), p. 244; for libraries, see Julia Kristeva, The Samurai, trans. by Barbara Bray (1990; New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 216; for bird migrations, see Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. by Aaron Asher (1978; London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 267–8; and for geological formations, see László Krasznahorkai, Satantango, trans. by George Szirtes (1985; London: Atlantic Books, 2013), p. 49. For other examples of continent-wide imagery, see Hans Koning, Acts of Faith, new edn (1986; London: Alison and Busby, 1990), p. 12; Richard Flanagan, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, new edn (1997; Sydney: Picador, 1998), pp. 227–8; Fabrice Humbert, Sila’s Fortune, trans. by Frank Wynne (2010; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013), p. 116; Ivan Klíma, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, trans. by Paul Wilson (1993; London: Granta Books, 1998), pp. 146–50; Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time, trans. by Charlotte Barslund and Per Petterson (2008; London: Vintage Books, 2011), pp. 130–1; and Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums, trans. by Michael Hofmann (1994; London: Granta Books, 1998), p. 108.
- 104.
Spahić, Hansen’s Children, p. 75; Canetti, The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel (1977; London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 47. For other examples, see Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Observed Trains, trans. by Edith Pargeter (1965; London: Abacus, 1990), pp. 52–3; Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, new edn (2005; London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 32, 309; Robert Schofield, The Fig Tree and the Mulberry (Luxembourg: Éditions Saint Paul, 2011), pp. 24–5, 207; Oksana Zabuzhko, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, trans. by Nina Shevchuk-Murray (2009; Las Vegas: AmazonCrossing, 2012), p. 138; and Leila Aboulela, The Translator, new edn (1999; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008), p. 16.
- 105.
Richard Rose, What is Europe? A Dynamic Perspective (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 2. See Fenoglio’s Una Questione Privata (A Private Affair, 1963), Haviaras’s When the Tree Sings (1979), Chwin’s Hanemann (Death in Danzig, 1995), Schofield’s The Fig Tree and the Mulberry (2011), Jelinek’s Die Ausgesperrten (Wonderful Wonderful Times, 1980), Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), Škvorecký’s Bassaxofon (The Bass Saxophone, 1967), Adamovich’s Khatynskaya povest (Khatyn, 1972), Andrzeyevski’s Popiol i Diament (Ashes and Diamonds, 1957), Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950), Ebejer’s Requiem for a Malta Fascist (1980), Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté (Roads to Freedom, 1945–9), Ngũgĩ’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), Levy’s Small Island (2004) and Feraoun’s Le fils du pauvre (The Poor Man’s Son, 1950).
- 106.
Miłosz, The Seizure of Power, trans. by Celina Wieniewska (1953; London: Abacus, 1985), pp. 214, 15.
- 107.
Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (1975; London: Abacus, 1986), p. 37; Weil, Life with a Star, trans. by Rita Klimova and Roslyn Schloss (1949; London: Penguin, 2002), p. 95; Levi, The Truce, in Levi, If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf (1958, 1963; London: Abacus, 1987), p. 293. Elie Wiesel also writes that ‘there was a time, in Europe, when Jews were forbidden to possess a body’ and ‘that the earth and sky of Europe had become great, haunted cemeteries’ (Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest, trans. by Frances Frenaye (1964; London: Heinemann, 1967), pp. 223, 120). See also Hans Keilson’s Komödie in Moll (Comedy in a Minor Key, 1947), Hana Demetz’s Ein Haus in Bohmen (The House on Prague Street, 1970), Jorge Semprun’s Le Grand Voyage (The Cattle Truck, 1963), Yoel Hoffmann’s Bernhart (Bernhard, 1989) and Imre Kertész’s Sorstalanság (Fateless, 1975).
- 108.
Szyszkowitz, On the Other Side, trans. by Todd C. Hanlin (1990; Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1991), p. 58; Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, new edn (2002; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 274; Štrpka, ‘Oh, Children Smeared with Honey and with Blood’, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 275. See also Voznesenskaya’s Zvezda Chernobyl (The Star Chernobyl, 1986), Koestler’s The Call-Girls (1972), Wu Ming’s 54 (2002), Celasin’s Svart Himmel, Svart Hav (Black Sky, Black Sea, 2007), Dovlatov’s Kompromiss (The Compromise, 1981), Bezmozgis’s The Free World (2011), Dürrenmatt’s Der Auftrag (The Assignment, 1986), Wolf’s Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident/A Day’s News, 1987), Koningsberger’s The Revolutionary (1968) and Chatwin’s Utz (1988).
- 109.
See Kárason’s Þar sem djöflaeyjan rís (Devil’s Island, 1983), Ulitskaya’s Veselye pokliorony (The Funeral Party, 1998), McEwan’s The Innocent (1990), Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), Dundy’s The Dud Avacado (1958), Stern’s Europe (1961), Busch’s War Babies (1988) and Koning’s Acts of Faith (1986).
- 110.
Stern, Europe, p. 75. Ulitskaya describes ‘the American envy of Old Europe, with its cultural subtlety […], and also Europe’s disdainful, but fundamentally envious, attitude to broad-shouldered, elemental America’ (Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party, trans. by Cathy Porter (1998; London: Indigo, 2000), pp. 102–3).
- 111.
Ingo Schulze, New Lives: The Youth of Enrico Türmer in Letters and Prose [etc.], trans. by John E. Woods (2005; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), p. 89; Penkov, ‘Buying Lenin’, in Penkov, East of the West, p. 59; Andreï Makine, Once upon the River Love, trans. by Geoffrey Strachan (1994; London: Penguin, 1999), p. 176; Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club, new edn (1964; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010), p. 56.
- 112.
Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club, pp. 60, 55.
- 113.
Kundera, ‘Sixty-Three Words’, in Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. by Linda Asher (1986; London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 145; Sahgal, ‘The Schizophrenic Imagination’, in Anna Rutherford, ed., From Commonwealth to Post-colonial (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), pp. 36, 36.
- 114.
Wolf, ‘Travel Report, about the Accidental Surfacing and Gradual Fabrication of a Literary Personage’, in Wolf, Cassandra, trans. by Jan van Heurck (1983; New York: The Noonday Press, 1988), p. 155.
- 115.
See Duras’s Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (A Sea of Troubles, 1950), Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Haasse’s Oeroeg (The Black Lake, 1948), Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour memoire (Murder in Memoriam, 1984), Ejersbo’s Eksil (Exile, 2009), Atxaga’s Siete Casas (Seven Houses in France, 2009), Antunes’s Os Cus de Judas (The Land at the End of the World, 1979), Hagerfors’s Valarna i Tanganyikasjön (The Whales in Lake Tanganyika, 1985), Japin’s De zwarte met het witte hart (The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, 1997), Couto’s O último voo do flamingo (The Last Flight of the Flamingo, 2000), May’s The Internationals (2003), Bärfuss’s Hundert Tage (One Hundred Days, 2008), Babnik’s Sušna doba (The Dry Season, 2012) and Troyanov’s Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2006).
- 116.
See Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, ‘Entry Points: An Introduction’, in Schimanski and Wolfe, eds, Border Poetics De-Limited (Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2007), pp. 10–11.
- 117.
Zabuzhko, Museum of Abandoned Secrets, p. 41.
- 118.
Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p. 8.
- 119.
O’Dowd and Wilson, ‘Frontiers of Sovereignty in the New Europe’, in O’Dowd and Wilson, eds, Borders, Nations and States: Frontiers of Sovereignty in the New Europe (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), p. 7.
- 120.
See Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p. 128; and Rajendra A. Chitnis, Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 1988–1998 (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), p. 1. At the end of the Cold War, the ‘Europist’ belief seemed more common amongst eastern Europeans than western Europeans, a fact captured in Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s claim that ‘we bring to Europe our belief in Europe’ (quoted in Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, ‘The Complex of an Unwanted Child: The Meanings of Europe in Polish Discourse’, in Malmborg and Stråth, eds, Meaning of Europe, p. 236). The point was also crystallised by Ismail Kadare who, in 2008, was exhorting compatriots to adapt to what he termed ‘Atlantic Europe’: ‘If we pretend to be a European country’, he argued, ‘first of all we need to construct Europe within ourselves, and then naturally to integrate in Europe’ (quoted in Adrian Brisku, Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878–2008 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), p. 169).
- 121.
Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p. 13. See Kertész’s Felszámolás (Liquidation, 2003), Klíma’s Čekání na tmu (Waiting for the Dark, 1993), Pišt’anek’s Rivers of Babylon (1991), Pelevin’s Zhizn’ nasekomykh (The Life of Insects, 1993), Senchin’s Minus (Minus, 2002), Stasiuk’s Biaty Kruk (White Raven, 1995), Schulze’s Simple Storys (Simple Stories, 1998) and Topol’s Sestra (City Sister Silver, 1994). For other novels of the changes, see Dubravka Ugrešić’s Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004), Eugen Ruge’s In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts (In Times of Fading Light, 2011), Vladimir Makanin’s Laz (Escape Hatch, 1990) and Daniela Hodrová’s Visite privée: Prague (Prague, I See a City…, 1991). A Russian character in Humbert’s Sila’s Fortune suggests that power is basically unchanged after 1989: ‘We’ve gone from being ruled by bureaucrats to being ruled by accountants’ (Humbert, Sila’s Fortune, p. 94).
- 122.
See Mazzini’s Drobtinice (Crumbs, 1987), Odrach’s Voshchad (Wave of Terror, 1972), Voinovich’s Zhizn i neobichainye priklyucheniya soldata Ivana Chonkina (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, 1969), Manea’s Plicul Negru (The Black Envelope, 1986), Moore’s The Colour of Blood (1988) and Gavelis’s Vilniaus pokeris (Vilnius Poker, 1989). Writers have compared life in the eastern bloc to being in ‘an enormous concentration camp’ and ‘in the belly of [a] languid, listless beast’ (Kundera, Slowness, trans. by Linda Asher (1995; London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 64; Stasiuk, White Raven, trans. by Wiesiek Powaga (1995; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), p. 95).
- 123.
Michael Cox, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, ‘Introduction’ to Cox, Booth and Dunne, eds, The Interregnum: Controversies in World Politics, 1989–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5.
- 124.
Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel and Gregor von Rezzori (1979; London: Picador, 2002), p. 1; Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. by Maureen Freely (2002; London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 101.
- 125.
Even regional authors have added to the confusion over Europe’s eastern limits. While Witold Gombrowicz argues that ‘Europe starts to draw to an end’ in Poland, Robert Perišić suggests ‘the edge of Europe’ is in the Balkans and Kurban Said claims that ‘the furthest eastern country of Europe’ is in the Caucasus (Gombrowicz quoted in Silvana Mandolessi, ‘Cultural Hierarchies, Secondary Nations: The Tension between Europe and “Minor” Cultures in Witold Gombrowicz and Jorge Luis Borges’, in Nele Bemong, Mirjam Truwant and Pieter Vermeulen, eds, Re-Thinking Europe: Literature and (Trans)National Identity (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), p. 156; Perišić, Our Man in Iraq, p. 260; Said, Ali and Nino, trans. by Jenia Graman (1937; London: Vintage, 2000), p. 116).
- 126.
With this in mind, Balibar was undoubtedly right to say that ‘[t]he fate of European identity as a whole is being played out in Yugoslavia’, but less convincing in his claim that Europe has learned ‘the lesson of tragedy’ (Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, pp. 6, 222). For direct criticism of western European policy, see Juan Goytisolo, State of Siege, trans. by Helen Lane (1995; London: Serpent’s Tail, 2003), p. 5; Saša Stanišić, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. by Anthea Bell (2006; London: Phoenix, 2009), pp. 126–7; and Armand, Clair Obscur, p. 34.
- 127.
See Hansson’s Steinhof (Steinhof, 1998), Albahari’s Svetski Putnik (Globetrotter, 2001), Todorović’s Diary of Interrupted Days (2009), Kim’s Die gefrorene Zeit (Frozen Time, 2008), Sadulaev’s Ya—chechenets! (I Am a Chechan!, 2006), Volos’s Khurramabad (Hurramabad, 2000), Lefteri’s A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible (2010), Makis’s The Spice Box Letters (2015), Bohjalian’s The Sandcastle Girls (2012), Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis, 2001) and McGahern’s Amongst Women (1990).
- 128.
For example, see Christian Jungerson’s Undtagelsen (The Exception, 2004), Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) and Jérôme Ferrari’s Où j’ai laissé mon âme (Where I Left My Soul, 2010).
- 129.
Ette, ‘European Literature(s)’, p. 123.
- 130.
McLeod, ‘Fantasy Relationships: Black British Canons in a Transnational World’, in Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds, A Black British Canon? (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 102.
- 131.
Charef, Tea in the Harem, trans. by Ed Emery (1983; London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989), p. 13; Ulitskaya, Funeral Party, p. 99.
- 132.
The gender imbalance in the ‘new Europe’ is coming under critical scrutiny. For example, commentators point out that female Members of the European Parliament ‘are generally white, middle class women’, while migrant women are not only underrepresented in political frameworks but also ‘end up having access to a very limited number of positions in society and in the labour market’ (Jane Freedman, ‘Women in the European Parliament’, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity, p. 298; Helma Lutz, ‘The Limits of European-ness: Immigrant Women in Fortress Europe’, Feminist Review, Vol. 57 (1997), p. 96).
- 133.
See Kristeva’s Les samouraïs (The Samurai, 1990), Veteranyi’s Warum das Kind in der Polenta kocht (Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, 1999), Rabinowich’s Spaltkopf (Splithead, 2009), Müller’s Reisende auf einem Bein (Travelling on One Leg, 1992), Honigmann’s Eine Liebe aus nichts (A Love Made out of Nothing, 1991), Plebanek’s Nielegalne zwiqzki (Illegal Liaisons, 2010) and Oksanen’s Puhdistus (Purge, 2008). For other examples, see Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Beryl Gilroy’s Boy-Sandwich (1989), Carlo Gébler’s Life of a Drum (1991), Tarek Eltayeb’s Mudun bila nakhil (Cities without Palms, 1992), Didier van Cauwelaert’s Un Aller Simple (One-Way, 1994), Kader Abdolah’s Spijkerschrift (My Father’s Notebook, 2000) and David Bezmozgis’s The Free World (2011). Although East-West migration is not associated with the pre-1989 period, so many dissidents arrived from the eastern bloc that one critic, writing at the end of the Cold War, estimated that 200 writers had come to the West from Soviet Russia alone (see Arnold McMillin, ‘Introduction’ to McMillin, ed., Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Russian Émigré Writing (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1991), p. x).
- 134.
Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford, Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 129. ‘It’s no good to be in between’, one of Elif Shafak’s characters remarks: ‘International politics does not appreciate ambiguity’ (Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul, p. 145).
- 135.
Özdamar, ‘Guest Faces’, p. 229.
- 136.
Keyman, ‘Turkey between Europe and Asia’, in Delanty, ed., Europe and Asia, p. 204.
- 137.
See Dalos’s 1985 (1985: A Historical Report, 1982), Dürrenmatt’s Der Auftrag (The Assignment, 1986) and Burgess’s 1985 (1978).
- 138.
Delanty, ‘Introduction: The Idea of a Post-Western Europe’, in Delanty, ed., Europe and Asia, p. 3.
- 139.
We can be more positive than Tariq Modood, who has suggested, tentatively, that ‘multiculturalism means a new way of being French, a new way of being German, a new way of being British—and perhaps also a new way of being European’ (Modood, ‘Introduction: The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe’, in Modood and Pnina Werbner, eds, The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997), p. 24).
- 140.
Apart from the themes covered here, Tony Judt, James Joll, Richard Hoggart and Douglas Johnson suggest further possibilities in the relation to the USA, the inability to learn from the past, the extension of the welfare state, the conflict of religious and scientific beliefs and the tension between elites, communities and individuals (see Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, new edn (2005; London: Pimlico, 2007), pp. 7–10; Joll, Europe, pp. 5–12; and Hoggart and Johnson, ‘Ideas about an “Idea of Europe”’, in Joyce, ed., Questions of Identity, pp. 98–100).
- 141.
D’haen, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.
- 142.
This includes fiction that examines imperial and post-imperial migrations away from Europe, as illustrated by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993), Albert Camus’s Le Premier Homme (The First Man, 1994), Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) and Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling, 1999). Speaking of the need for more research into views of Europe from elsewhere, Ottmar Ette is in no doubt ‘that European literature […] cannot be adequately understood if one neglects [its] global contexts’ (Ette, ‘European Literature(s)’, p. 156).
- 143.
Jensen, ‘Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives’ (Review), Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2013), p. 497.
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Hammond, A. (2016). Introduction. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_1
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