Examines how German-Jewish writers from Eastern Europe who migrated to Germany during or after the Cold War have widened European cultural memory to include the traumas of the Gulag.

Edited volume tracing the development of a new generation of German Jewish writers, offering fresh interpretations of individual works, and probing the very concept of "German Jewish literature."

In the past thirty years, the Sino-Jewish encounter in modern China has increasingly garnered scholarly and popular attention. This volume will be the first to focus on the transcultural exchange between Ashkenazic Jewry and China. The essays here investigate how this exchange of texts and translations, images and ideas, has enriched both Jewish and Chinese cultures and prepared for a global, inclusive world literature. The book breaks new ground in the field, covering such new topics as the images of China in Yiddish and German Jewish letters, the intersectionality of the Jewish and Chinese literature in illuminating the implications for a truly global and inclusive world literature, the biographies of prominent figures in Chinese-Jewish connections, the Chabad engagement in contemporary China. Some of the fundamental debates in the current scholarship will also be addressed, with a special emphasis on how many Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai and how much interaction occurred between the Jewish refugees and the resident Chinese population during the wartime and its aftermath.

The advent of the new age has alerted us to the conflicted nature of historical memory which defined the 20th century while simultaneously assaulting us with new historical upheavals that demand responsibility and critical consideration. As the historical text bears traces of the writing subject, the element of deception is remarkable, meaning historical memory easily lends itself to forgery and false and subjective projections. As such, how do we think about the past, about history, about memory, and how does memory function? Is history an objective account, a collection of dry, reliable facts? Is it an imaginative narrative, tinged with nostalgia, a projection of our wishful thinking, the workings of our subjective perceptions and attitudes, our states of mind? The essays in this volume focus on the relevance of the past to the present and future in terms of the shifting attitudes to personal and collective experiences that have shaped dominant Western critical discourses about history, memory, and nostalgia. The contributors here take issue with the epistemological, hermeneutic, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the representational practices through which we revisit and revise the meaning of the past.

Brexit and the Migrant Voice provides a platform for the perspectives of European citizens and migrants living and working in the UK by assessing their representation in British and European cultural productions (literature, drama, the media) and by foregrounding their attitudes, their fears, and their concerns about Brexit. The book looks at Brexit through the eyes of Britain’s European citizens (‘Europe in Britain’), while also looking at European perceptions of Britain as a nation (‘Britain in Europe’), via a geographical journey – from West to East –across Europe. The book assesses how these countries, their citizens, and their cultural productions engage with the questions and challenges posed by Brexit. It brings together an exciting line-up of European academics and scholars, both early-career and well-established, from a variety of subject disciplines. Some live and work within UK Higher Education Institutions and thus look at Britain from within, while others reside within their countries of origin and look at Britain from the outside. Their chapters assess Brexit via a plethora of cultural outputs – Brexit fiction from their individual countries, opinion pieces, press discussions, but also narratives of compatriots affected by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. The authors’ individual focal points on fiction, journalism, blog posts, theatre performances, and other cultural productions offer an innovative and comprehensive picture about thoughts on Brexit from around Europe that will fill an important gap in the market. This book will appeal to the academic market at undergraduate, postgraduate, and academic researcher level in a wide variety of disciplines including Literature, Politics and International Relations, European Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Media Studies.

Teresa Pac provides a much-needed contribution to the discussion on shared culture as foundational to societal survival. Through the examination of common culture as a process in medieval Kraków, Poznań, and Lublin, Pac challenges the ideology of difference—institutional, religious, ethnic, and nationalistic. Similarly, Pac maintains, twenty-first century Polish leaders utilize anachronistic approaches in the invention of Polish Catholic identity to counteract the country’s increasing ethnic and religious diversity. As in the medieval period, contemporary Polish political and social elites subscribe to the European Union’s ideology of difference, legitimized by a European Christian heritage, and its intended basis for discrimination against non-Christians and non-white individuals under the auspices of democratic values and minority rights, among which Muslims are a significant target.

This volume explores the rich, evolving body of contemporary cultural practices that reflect on a European project of diversity, new dynamics between and across cultures in Europe, and its interactions with the world. There have been calls across Europe for both traditional national identities and new forms of identity and community, assertions of regionalized identity and declarations of multiculturalism and multilingualism. These essays respond to this critical moment by analyzing the literature of migration as a (re)writing of European subjects. They ask fundamental questions from a variety of theoretical and critical standpoints: How do migrants write new identities into and against old national (meta)narratives? How do they interrogate constructions of identity? What kinds of literary experiments are emerging in this unstable context, e.g. in the graphic novel and avant-garde film? This collection makes a unique contribution to contemporary European literary studies by taking an interdisciplinary, transnational and comparative perspective, thereby addressing readers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and stimulating new research on the ambitious writing and thinking taking place across the borders of Europe today.

Nu s-au introdus date

Since the turn of the 21st century, countless literary endeavors by 'new Germans' have entered the spotlight of academic research. Yet 'minority writing', with its distinctive renegotiation of traditional concepts of cultural identity, is far from a recent phenomenon in German literature. A hundred years previously, the intense involvement of German-Jewish intellectuals in cultural and political discourses on Jewish identity put a clear stamp on German modernism. This book is the first to unfold literary parallels between these two riveting periods in German cultural history. Drawing on the philosophical oeuvre of Jean-Luc Nancy, a comparative reading of texts by, amongst others, Beer-Hofmann, Kermani, Özdamar, Roth, Schnitzler, and Zaimoglu examines a variety of literary approaches to the thorny issue of cultural identity, while developing an overarching perspective on the ‘politics of literature’.

The book was inspired by the Erasmus+ Project "Border Education - Space, Memory and Reflections on Transculturality." By adopting an inter-disciplinary approach sensitive to the role of memory in 'bordering' processes, the included essays examine a range of those processes affecting the lives of people in different parts of Europe. The authors call upon a range of 'border narratives' and 'border' representations in cultural media, museum spaces, textbooks, the lecture theatre and the classroom to offer fresh perspectives on border issues drawn from Germany, France, Northern Ireland, Sweden, and Slovenia. (Series: Learning Europe. Perspectives for a Didactic of European Cultural Studies / Europa lernen. Perspektiven fur eine Didaktik europaischer Kulturstudien, Vol. 7) [Subject: Sociology, European Studies, Cultural Studies]