Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere

by R. Robinson

Overview

Richard Robinson examines the representation of shifting European borders in twentieth-century narrative, drawing together an unusual grouping of texts from different national canons and comparing the various ways that fictional settings transmute European placelessness into narrative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349541294
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	10/23/2007
Series:	Language, Discourse, Society
Edition description:	1st ed. 2007
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

RICHARD ROBINSON is Lecturer in English at Swansea University, UK. He specialises in twentieth-century fiction and literary theory, and has published on James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements An Introduction to European Nowheres Place-in-Space/Space-in-Place: Theories of the Border From Border to Front: Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno Recreating Habsburg Borders: The Later Fiction of Joseph Roth 'The earth is what is not us': Yugoslavia in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Buckley in a General Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and Central Europe Notes References Appendix: maps Index

Editorial Reviews

'Richard Robinson's study of shifting European borders in twentieth-century literature offers a refreshingly new take on how fictional texts negotiate and transmute imaginatively a sense of locality - of geographical and temporal emplacement...This study is important for all those who read books not merely to confirm their theoretical models of preference, but also to delve into fiction's own signifying borderzones.' - Cristina Sandru, English

From the Publisher