Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise examines the triple compact made by displaced authors with language, their host country, and the homeland left behind. It considers the entwined phenomena of expatriation and homelessness, and the artistic responses to these conditions, including reconstructions of identity and the creation of idealized new homelands. Conrad and Gombrowicz, writers who lived with the condition of exile, were in the vanguard of what today has become a thriving intellectual community of transnationals whose calling card is precisely their hybridity and fluency in multiple cultural traditions. Conrad and Gombrowicz's Polish childhoods emerge as cultural touchstones against which they formulated their writing philosophies. Gasyna claims that in both cases negotiating exile involved processes of working through a traumatic past through the construction of narrative personae that served as strategic doubles. Both authors engaged in extensive manipulation of their public image. Above all, Conrad and Gombrowicz's narratives are united by a desire for a linguistic refuge, a proposed home-in-language, and a set of techniques deployed in the representation of their predicament as subjects caught in-between.

Utilizing an array of cultural texts, fiction, servant autobiography, diaries and pamphlets, this study examines the debate on mass literacy as it developed around the figure of the Victorian servant, as well as its significance for understanding the nexus between class and narrative power in nineteenth-century literature.

This book introduces literary métissage as a way to research, teach, and live ethically «with all our relations» in our precarious times. The authors theorize and perform literary métissage through the praxis of life writing, braiding their autobiographical texts, in various (mixed) genres, into seven themes. Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times explores this writing praxis, with its more inclusive and generative notions of knowledge and knowledge practices, as a tool for creating more just societies and schools.

At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.

This book traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830s.

This volume problematizes the concept and practice of translation in an interconnected world in which English, despite its hegemonic status, can no longer be considered a coherent unified entity but rather a mobile resource subject to various kinds of hybridization. Drawing upon recent work in the domains of translation studies, literary studies and (socio-)linguistics, it explores the centrality of translation as both a trope for the analysis of contemporary transcultural dynamics and as a concrete communication practice in the globalized world. The chapters range across many geographic realities and genres (including fiction, memoir, animated film and hip-hop), and deal with subjects as varied as self-translation, translational ethics and language change. As a whole, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how meanings are generated and relayed in a context of super-diversity, in which traditional understandings of language and translation can no longer be sustained.

Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Vienna, language: English, abstract: The following seminar paper is concerned with the presentation of a hybrid identity in Fred Wah ́s Diamond Grill and the cultural significance of food. In the beginning, the most important stages of the author ́s life shall help to embed the story in its historical and socio-cultural context. After a detailed discussion on the symbolic meaning of food, with various examples providing insight into the many functions that food takes in daily life and human existence, as well as its crucial role in the context of communities, the paper will shift its focus to the text itself. The term "biotext" and its emergence will be discussed and information on identity, ethnicity, other important themes and issues in the text and the language employed by Wah will be given. The last part of this paper constitutes its centrepiece, in which food as a metaphor and its cultural significance as a multilayered strategy and trope in postcolonial life writing will be discussed. The culinary language employed in Wah ́s innovative discourse of Diamond Grill makes the concept of food a metonymy of the elaboration of identity and culture. The use of food as a metaphor in the author ́s culinary memoirs will be discussed, and the way in which the metaphor of food provides an axis for the understanding of Wah ́s explorations of his socio-cultural background will be explained in more detail.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Vienna, language: English, abstract: The following seminar paper is concerned with the presentation of a hybrid identity in Fred Wah ́s Diamond Grill and the cultural significance of food. In the beginning, the most important stages of the author ́s life shall help to embed the story in its historical and socio-cultural context. After a detailed discussion on the symbolic meaning of food, with various examples providing insight into the many functions that food takes in daily life and human existence, as well as its crucial role in the context of communities, the paper will shift its focus to the text itself. The term „biotext“ and its emergence will be discussed and information on identity, ethnicity, other important themes and issues in the text and the language employed by Wah will be given. The last part of this paper constitutes its centrepiece, in which food as a metaphor and its cultural significance as a multilayered strategy and trope in postcolonial life writing will be discussed. The culinary language employed in Wah ́s innovative discourse of Diamond Grill makes the concept of food a metonymy of the elaboration of identity and culture. The use of food as a metaphor in the author ́s culinary memoirs will be discussed, and the way in which the metaphor of food provides an axis for the understanding of Wah ́s explorations of his socio-cultural background will be explained in more detail.