European Writers in Exile (Abstracts Due April 15)
We have a contract with Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield) in hand and are issuing a targeted call for, primarily, the following important writers. We have accepted a number of essays already and are seeking to round our volume, as follows.
We seek essays of 5,000 to 6,000 words for an anthology that explores the work of some of the more popular and/or influential European writers in nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century exile.
While we understand the term “exile” to refer typically to European writers who have either been forced to leave their home country or region or chosen self-exile, this term need not be defined so narrowly. That is, various countries in Europe have long been both a refuge for people and writers from many countries and, as a continent, a strife-torn region which has forced many to flee within the continent or beyond it. Thus, in our view, the phrase “in exile” involves writers moving across borders in multiple directions and for multiple reasons, including for reasons of duress (official or personal) or personal quest.
Besides the famous exilic Paris years before, between, and after the world wars, you might consider Irish writers like James Joyce; English writers Oscar Wilde or Salman Rushdie; German writers (especially those of the German exilliteratur) such as Thomas Mann or Karl Marx; French writers such as Rimbaud and Camus; Neither should we forget the many Russian writers who have been in exile from their homeland during one or more historical eras, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn. Of course, this is necessarily a partial list but at this point we are looking for a few essays on the most significant European writers in exile.
This collection of transnational, globalized European literature studies envisions understanding the intersection of our contemporary world and various writers in exile in new cultural, historical, spatial, and epistemological frameworks. How does literary production in an increasingly globalized world—when seen from exile—affect a view back towards a country or region left behind? Or, conversely, how does exile push a writer to look outward to new (trans-)nationalized space(s)? How does (do) your chosen text(s) construct meaning at/in/against the context of a globalized, dehumanizing, suffocating world? These and other questions are important to investigate on this topic and, taken in sum, we intend to have an academically rigorous, interesting, and cohesive volume on the topic. The contributions we have already accepted meet this standard, and we encourage you to submit an abstract for consideration.
Abstracts of about 500 words & CV by April 15, 2017 to:
Jeff Birkenstein, Ph.D., & Robert Hauhart, J.D., Ph.D.
Saint Martin’s University
5000 Abbey Way SE
Lacey, WA 98503
Completed first drafts of around 5,000 words by August 1, 2017