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This collection explores our fascination with homes across time, cultures, and disciplines while unpacking the relationship between private yearning and public belonging, illustrating the limitations and fluidity of identity and affiliation through the idea of homes and ancestral homelands.While rooted in comparative literature and critical art history in the context of diaspora studies, the book's approach intersects with cultural geography, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, architecture, urban studies, film studies, nationalism, postcolonial theory, sociology, and migration studies. Conceived as relational and changing, the collection emphasizes that home/homeland studies are plural and fluctuating concepts encompassing multi-local affiliations, places, gender roles, languages, practices, relations, and power.In this tangled site of contesting national discourses, affiliations, nostalgias, and ideologies, we can uncover valuable insight into how we construct the story of ourselves through traveling bodies, spaces, homes, and mixed geographies.

Women writers offer us rich and diverse perspectives on exile, yet they remain relatively unexplored in the scholarship. This book aims to address this omission by illuminating the life and work of four German-speaking writers exiled in Britain after 1933. Gerda Mayer, Gabriele Tergit, Ruth Feiner and Eva Priester, in different and unique ways, all articulate ideas of (national) identity and home in their work, opening up new ways of understanding the impact of exile and gender on belonging. Using Heimat theory, nomadic subjectivity and transnationalism, the women's works are interrogated to encourage a reassessment of traditional conceptions of Heimat and belonging for refugees, exiles, and those distanced – whether physically or emotionally – from «home».

Der Sammelband untersucht den Heimat-Begriff aus philosophischer, linguistischer sowie literaturwissenschaftlicher und -didaktischer Perspektive. Im Zentrum stehen (auto-)fiktionale Texte, die Erfahrungen des Heimatverlustes und der Heimatsuche thematisieren. Die Analysen erschließen die Gesamtheit der individuellen und kollektiven Erfahrungen und zeigen diverse Auffassungen und Vorstellungen von Heimat auf. Eine postmigrantische Gesellschaft steht vor der Aufgabe, eine gemeinsame Heimat für alle zu schaffen. Alle Heimat-Narrative in das kulturelle Gedächtnis zu überführen, ist eine der Voraussetzungen dafür. Im Literaturunterricht kann das Bedeutungsspektrum des Heimat-Begriffes erweitert und die Vielfältigkeit der menschlichen Heimatkonzepte als gleichberechtigt erfahrbar gemacht werden.

What is patriotism? How has it been defined, embraced, and sometimes rejected? How are various attitudes toward it reflected in literature? These are the kinds of questions this volume will explore from deliberately diverse perspectives.

Die Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur (STSL) veröffentlichen seit 1975 herausragende literatur-, geschichts- und kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten zu vornehmlich deutscher Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Schwerpunkt der literaturgeschichtlichen und theoretischen Abhandlungen sowie der Quellen- und Materialienbände ist das Verhältnis von literarischem Text und gesellschaftlich-historischem Kontext. Als maßgebliche Publikationsreihe einer seit den 1960er Jahren einflussreichen Sozialgeschichte der Literatur prägt STSL zugleich die literaturwissenschaftliche Diskussion über mögliche Austauschbeziehungen zwischen Literatur-, Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften.

Die Dorfgeschichte im Vormärz kennzeichnet eine Ablehnung der neoklassizistischen « Kunstperiode » zugunsten der von Robert Prutz definierten « Unterhaltungsliteratur ». Das bedeutet die Hinwendung des auktorialen Erzählers zur Erzählgegenwart, eine oft autobiographisch ausgerichtete Ortsgebundenheit, « Oralität » mit gelegentlicher Verwendung von Dialekt und dem durchgängigen Gebrauch « einfacher Formen ». Die Darstellung sentimentalischer Gefühlsregungen der Dorfbewohner entspricht den demokratischen Bestrebungen der Aufklärung, sie sind Teil ihrer emanzipatorischen Selbstbestimmung. Während in Frühformen der Dorfgeschichte der Schweiz (Zschokke, Gotthelf) didaktische Aspekte im Vordergrund stehen, sind es im Vormärz, der Kernzeit der Dorfgeschichten, gesellschaftspolitische Anliegen. Nach 1848 degenerierte die Dorfgeschichte durch zunehmend reaktionären Nationalismus zur « Heimatliteratur ». Ein erneutes Interesse an Dorfgeschichten begann in der DDR in den 1960iger Jahren und erfuhr in der BRD um 1980 eine zunächst nostalgisch geprägte Renaissance, die im Kontext ökologischer Debatten und einer Skepsis gegenüber Formen der Akzeleration an Popularität gewann.

Das Unheimliche (oder auch das Verdrängte, nach Freud) fördert eine tiefere Einsicht in die uns umgebende Realität und somit eine Reflexion, die der herrschenden Akzeleration des Alltags, der Oberflächlichkeit, dem Narzissmus und Hedonismus unserer Gesellschaft entgegenwirkt. Das Unheimliche bietet eine Chance, um Denk- und Handlungsmuster, die unser Selbst und unsere Realität gestalten (Heimat) zu überdenken und darauf zu reagieren. Ziel dieses Bandes ist die Erweiterung des Heimatkonzeptes um das Unheimliche mit dem Anspruch, Heimat zu einem nützlichen Rahmen für die Gestaltung offener Lebens- und Kommunikationsformen zu instrumentalisieren und dem Missbrauch des Begriffs als Grundpfeiler identitärer Denkströmungen gegenzusteuern.

In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents'ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic “returns”: first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives—including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others—register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory.

Ob in homerischen Epen, antiken Romanen, Epen und höfischen Romanen des Mittelalters, frühneuzeitlichen Prosaromanen, Bildungsromanen, historischen Romanen, Autobiographien, multimodalen oder postkolonialen Romanen – der Raum, aus dem die Hauptfigur stammt, spielt innerhalb der erzählten Welt häufig eine entscheidende Rolle. Der Band wirft anhand von Fallbeispielen aus der erzählenden europäischen Literatur von der Antike bis heute Schlaglichter auf die je spezifischen Zusammenhänge von Raum und Herkunft. Der thematische Fokus der Frage nach Räumen der Herkunft lenkt den Blick darüber hinaus immer auch auf handlungs-, figuren- und zeitspezifische Momente. Die Fallstudien des Bandes untersuchen einzeltextspezifisch und ebenendifferenziert Herkunftsräume und versuchen von den Texten, ihren Darstellungsstrategien und Erzählinhalten ausgehend, narratologische Beschreibungskategorien für die methodisch kontrollierte, historisch adäquate Deutung von Texten fruchtbar zu machen. Dass im Zusammenspiel von Zeit, Raum, Figuren und Ereignissen die Räume der Herkunft eine wesentliche Schnittstelle darstellen, mag dabei nicht nur als allgemein, sondern gerade auch als fallweise zu begründende These gelten.

Counternarrative Possibilities reads Cormac McCarthy's Westerns against the backdrop of two formative tropes in American mythology: virgin land (from the 1950s) and homeland (after'9/11'). Looking at McCarthy's Westerns in the context of American Studies, James Dorson shows how his novels counter the national narratives underlying these tropes and reinvest them with new, potentially transformative meaning. Departing from prevailing accounts of McCarthy that place him in relation to his literary antecedents, Counternarrative Possibilities takes a forwardlooking approach that reads McCarthy's work as a key influence on millennial fiction. Weaving together disciplinary history with longstanding debates over the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this book is at once an exploration of the limits of ideology critique in the twenty-first century and an original reconsideration of McCarthy's work'after postmodernism'.

Explores how contemporary novels dealing with flight and expulsion after the Second World War unsettle traditional notions of Heimat without abandoning place-based notions of belonging.At the end of the Second World War, millions of Germans and Poles fled or were expelled from the border regions of what had been their countries. This monograph examines how, in Cold War and post-Cold War Europe since the 1970s, writers have responded to memories or postmemories of this traumatic displacement. Friederike Eigler engages with important currents in scholarship -- on'Heimat,'the much-debated German concept of'homeland'; on the spatial turnin literary studies; and on German-Polish relations -- arguing for a transnational approach to the legacies of flight and expulsion and for a spatial approach to Heimat. She explores notions of belonging in selected postwar and contemporary German novels, with a comparative look at a Polish novel, Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night (1998). Eigler finds dynamic manifestations of place in Tokarczuk's novel, in Horst Bienek's 1972-82 Gleiwitz tetralogy about the historical border region of Upper Silesia, and in contemporary novels by Reinhard Jirgl, Christoph Hein, Kathrin Schmidt, Tanja Dückers, Olaf Müller, and Sabrina Janesch. In a decisive departure from earlierapproaches, Eigler explores how these novels foster an awareness of the regions'multiethnic and multinational histories, unsettling traditional notions of Heimat without altogether abandoning place-based notions of belonging. Friederike Eigler is Professor of German at Georgetown University.

The last couple of decades have witnessed a flourishing of Arab-American literature across multiple genres. Yet, increased interest in this literature is ironically paralleled by a prevalent bias against Arabs and Muslims that portrays their long presence in the US as a recent and unwelcome phenomenon. Spanning the 1990s to the present, Carol Fadda-Conrey takes in the sweep of literary and cultural texts by Arab-American writers in order to understand the ways in which their depictions of Arab homelands, whether actual or imagined, play a crucial role in shaping cultural articulations of US citizenship and belonging. By asserting themselves within a US framework while maintaining connections to their homelands, Arab-Americans contest the blanket representations of themselves as dictated by the US nation-state.Deploying a multidisciplinary framework at the intersection of Middle-Eastern studies, US ethnic studies, and diaspora studies, Fadda-Conrey argues for a transnational discourse that overturns the often rigid affiliations embedded in ethnic labels. Tracing the shifts in transnational perspectives, from the founders of Arab-American literature, like Gibran Kahlil Gibran and Ameen Rihani, to modern writers such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Joseph Geha, Randa Jarrar, and Suheir Hammad, Fadda-Conrey finds that contemporary Arab-American writers depict strong yet complex attachments to the US landscape. She explores how the idea of home is negotiated between immigrant parents and subsequent generations, alongside analyses of texts that work toward fostering more nuanced understandings of Arab and Muslim identities in the wake of post-9/11 anti-Arab sentiments.

That the writings of John Milton continue to provoke study and analysis centuries after his lifetime speaks no doubt to his literary greatness but also to the many ways in which his art both engaged and transcended the political and theological tensions of his age. In Dominion Undeserved, Eric B. Song offers a brilliant reading of Milton's major writings, finding in them a fundamental impasse that explains their creative power. According to Song, a divided view of creation governs Milton's related systems of cosmology, theology, art, and history. For Milton, any coherent entity—a nation, a poem, or even the new world—must be carved out of and guarded against an original unruliness. Despite being sanctioned by God, however, this agonistic mode of creation proves ineffective because it continues to manifest internal rifts that it can never fully overcome. This dilemma is especially pronounced in Milton's later writings, including Paradise Lost, where all forms of creativity must strive against the fact that chaos precedes order and that disruptive forces will continue to reemerge, seemingly without end.Song explores the many ways in which Milton transforms an intractable problem into the grounds for incisive commentary and politically charged artistry. This argument brings into focus topics ranging from Milton's recurring allusions to the Eastern Tartars, the way Milton engages with country house poetry and colonialist discourses in Paradise Lost, and the lasting relevance of Anglo-Irish affairs for his late writings. Song concludes with a new reading of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in which he shows how Milton's integration of conflicting elements forms the heart of his literary archive and confers urgency upon his message even as it reaches its future readers.

Heimat has been a crucial concept for the construction of identity in the German-speaking world. Seemingly impossible to translate, Heimat has served to describe feelings of comfort and belonging that are traditionally tied to a specific location, be it one's place of birth or childhood home. Yet, in a world characterized by ever increasing global influences and a fast-paced lifestyle, the notion of Heimat as a static, inflexible and rather exclusionary idea is becoming more and more obsolete and is giving way to new hybrid Heimat forms that encompass traditional as well as foreign elements. Thus, Heimat can no longer be perceived as a solely German concept but is rapidly merging binary opposites, shaping Germans'understandings of home in new and unexpected ways.The nine essays in this anthology explore these hybrid forms of Heimat in our globalized world from multiple angles. Some take a look at traditional genres of Heimat like the Heimatfilm or Heimatroman and examine how contemporary filmmakers (Tom Tykwer, Fatih Akın) and authors (Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Hugo Loetscher) have appropriated those genres to arrive at an updated version of Heimat in the 21st century. Other articles focus on gendered readings of Heimat and show how Mo Asumang's Roots Germania and Ula Stöckl's Das alte Lied emancipate the term from its nurturing, motherly qualities and instead provide women—including women of color—with powerful agency. Finally, contributors explore Heimat in the regional and historical contexts of East and West Germany, Switzerland and Romania. In the process, this anthology inscribes itself into the ongoing discourse on Heimat and enriches it by showing how the current notion of Heimat transcends traditional boundaries of nation, culture and race.

How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written? In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writers—essayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoirists—respond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. Their contributions—poignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely political—make for an offering that is remarkable for the candor and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Susan Abulhawa, Suad Amiry, Rana Barakat, Mourid Barghouti, Beshara Doumani, Sharif S. Elmusa, Rema Hammami, Mischa Hiller, Emily Jacir, Penny Johnson, Fady Joudah, Jean Said Makdisi, Karma Nabulsi, Raeda Sa'adeh, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli.

The concept of Heimat with its seemingly pre- or anti-modern connotations of rootedness in a place of origin is central to a critical understanding of German history and culture. Over the course of the past fifteen years, scholars across a range of disciplines have found new ways to examine the changing notions of Heimat – its multifaceted cultural, literary, and visual history, its gendered connotations, and its national and ideological appropriations. This anthology is the first to examine cultural manifestations of Heimat by giving special consideration to issues of memory and space. The contributions to this volume challenge static notions of place often associated with Heimat. Instead, they explore the social and cultural production of places of belonging as they emerge in literary and visual narratives ranging from 1800 to 2000 and beyond. Although the anthology includes historical perspectives on Heimat, its overall objective is not to trace its cultural or literary history, but to place this complex term into new conceptual contexts. Drawing attention to manifestations of Heimat within German literary and cultural studies provides a rich ground for exploring the transformation of locality in trans/national contexts.

Depuis l'origine de la horde, le foyer est au centre de notre représentation du monde. Il est le point focal de la demeure... Image rassurante et chaleureuse du foyer à proximité duquel veille quelque vestale mystique... Une clarté un rien angoissante, cependant... Au-delà des clichés, le foyer est le point précis de l'imaginaire où le caractère confortable de la chaleur peut soudain s'inverser. On comprend que le discours métalittéraire en ait fait l'un des objets privilégiés et que le livre y a découvert ses capacités de rayonnement.

Heimat als Aventiure – unter Verwendung des mittelhochdeutschen Aventiurekonzepts wird der Heimatbegriff zwischen 1989 und 2001 an seinen Rändern außerhalb der traditionellen Heimatliteratur untersucht. Heimat wird vom Territorium abgelöst, was eine Individualisierung des Begriffs zur Folge hat und gleichzeitig dessen Öffnung durch die Auffassung von Geschichte als Erzählung ermöglicht. Über eine Postmoderne-Konzeption nach Welsch und dem erwähnten erzähltheoretischen Zugang über Aventiure, einer strukturalistischen Vorgangsweise und der möglichen-Welten-Theorie wird Heimat beweglich und schließlich selbst zu einer Erzählung. Heimat erscheint als Möglichkeitsraum einer Aventiure, die durch das Erzählen performativ realisiert wird. Histoire und discours fallen dabei in eins, wodurch Heimat entsteht.