Bücher der Reihe Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

Beyond Collective Memory investigates the elisions of "memory," and invites an exploration of the African pasts and imaginaries that exist beyond it.

This book focuses on literature and cinema in English or French by authors and directors not working in their native language. Artists with hybrid identities have become a defining phenomenon of contemporary reality following the increased mobility between civilisations during the postcolonial period and the waves of emigration to the West. Cinema and prose fiction remain the most popular sources of cultural consumption, not least owing to the adaptability of both to the new electronic media. This volume considers cultural products in English and French in which the explicitly multi-focal representation of authors'' experiences of their native languages/cultures makes itself conspicuous. The essays explore work by the peripheral and those without a country, while problematising what might be meant by the widely used but not always well-defined term ''bicultural''. The first section looks at films by such well-known filmmakers working in France as Bouchareb, Kechiche, Legzouli and Dridi, as well as the animated feature Persepolis. Here the focus is on the representation of human experience in spatial terms, exploring the appropriation of territory cohabited by ''local'' people, newcomers and their children, haunted by the cultural memories of distant places. The second part is devoted to multicultural authors whose ''native'' language was English, Russian, Polish, Hungarian or Spanish (Beckett, Herzen, Voyeikova, Triolet, Conrad, Hoffmann, Kristof, Dorfman), and their creative engagement with difference. A study of the emergence of multilingual writing in Montaigne and an autobiographical essay by Elleke Boehmer on growing up surrounded by English, Dutch, Afrikaans and Zulu frame the volume''s chapters. The collection relishes the freedom provided by liberation from the confines of one language and culture and the delight in creative multilingualism. This book will be of significant interest to those studying the subject of biculturalism, as well as the fields of comparative literature and cinema.

The essays collected in this volume explore how contemporary literature imagines living between identities and locales¿Nigerian and American, Turkish and German, Sudanese and European¿in order to ask broad questions about the meaning of cosmopolitanism.

This volume brings together scholars, students and writers as well as artists from around the world. By choosing a thematic focus on "transition" in women's lives, we present research on women who have crossed biological, geopolitical and political borders as well as emotional, sexual, cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Looking at a series of themes across three literatures (Mexico, Turkey and Bengal), the book examines hotels, melancholy, orientalism, femicide and the ghost story in a series of literary traditions outside the 'West'.

This book distinguishes itself from previous scholarship by offering an inclusive and comprehensive treatment of urban walking from 1800 to the present.

The essays collected in this volume explore how contemporary literature imagines living between identities and locales-Nigerian and American, Turkish and German, Sudanese and European-in order to ask broad questions about the meaning of cosmopolitanism.

The ten chapters collected in this book manifest the current global interest in trans-border dialogues and trace the origins and development of Italian and Bengali internationalisms in the period from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. Despite having differing political statuses and lacking a shared geographical or historical space, Bengal and Italy remained uniquely connected and, at times, actively sought to transcend different kinds of constraints in their search for a significant dialogue and mutual enrichment in the fields of literature, music, architecture, art, cinema, diplomacy, entrepreneurship, travels, education and intellectual engagement. In this context, the volume confronts strategies of evaluation adopted by prominent representatives of the Bengali and Italian cultural environments with particular emphasis on readings embedded in the moment of contact. Both regions benefitted from this 'elective affinity' as they advanced along their respective paths towards a fuller awareness of their specific identity, and thus set a positive example of transcultural understanding which may inspire today's world.