Re-thinking Europe : literature and (trans)national identity / edited by Nele Bemong, Mirjam Truwant and Pieter Vermeulen.

Title from PDF title page (viewed February 5, 2008).

Includes bibliographical references.

Re-Thinking Europe sets out to investigate the place of the idea of Europe in literature and comparative literary studies. The essays in this collection turn to the past, when Europe became synonymous with a tradition of peace and tolerance beyond national borders, and enter into a critical dialogue with the present, in which Europe has increasingly become associated with a history of oppression and violence. The different essays together demonstrate how the idea of Europe cannot be thought apart from the tension between the regional and the global, between nationalism and pluralism, and can therefore be re-thought as an opportunity for an identity beyond national or ethnic borders. Engaging contemporary discourses on hybrid, postcolonial, and transnational identity, this volume shows how literature can function as both a vital tool to forge new identities and a power subversive of such attempts at identity-formation. Like Europe, it is always marked by the tension between integration and resistance. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of modern literature, comparative literature, and European studies, as well as people concerned with cultural memory and the relation between literature and cultural identity.

Re-Thinking Europe; Acknowledgements; Table of Contents; Introduction: Europe, in Comparison; Part I: Beyond the Nation? Inter-, Trans-, and Hypernational Identities; Europeanism in One Country: August Vermeylen, Paul van Ostaijen, and the International Approach to Nationalism; The Histoire anglaise: Towards a Cosmopolitan View of the Other?; Global Regionalism; Why the World Is Never Enough: Re-Conceptualizing World Literature as a Self-Substitutive Order; Translation and Its Role in European Literatures: Some Questions and Answers.

Th e (Im)Possibilities of a European Literary History: The Case of FlandersPart Ii: Performing Transnational Identity; Re-Thinking Ottoman Empire: East-West Collaboration in Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle; Kader Attia's Arabesque: Inscribing Islam in a Provincialized Europe; The Old World through a Baroque Mirror: Europe in the Work of Alejo Carpentier; Cultural Hierarchies, Secondary Nations: The Tension between Europe and "Minor" Cultures in Witold Gombrowicz and Jorge Luis Borges; Arriving in Eurasia: Yoko Tawada Re-Writing Europe; Part Iii: Conjuring the Past, Imagining Europe.

Staging a European Republic of Letters: (Supra- )National Concepts of Literature in Arno Schmidt's Early ProseEpistle to the Europeans (On Not Reading Kipling); Prodesse et Delectare: The World of National Literatures and the World of Literature; The Late Europe: Elias Canetti and the Ordering of Time and Space in Auto Da F©♭; Prague in Victorian Fiction: An Imagological Approach; European Identity from Normality to Immanence; Notes on Contributors.

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