The text includes excerpts and short stories from an international body of writers examining almost 100 years of literature on the experience of exile from a home country and displacement to the United States. Through the selections readers will investigate how the authors have portrayed the journeys, hopes, and hardships of dislocation and alienation, and the role literature may play in creating a sense of community for immigrants, refugees, and people living in exile.

Exile and displacement are central topics in classical literature. Previous research has been mostly biographical and has focused on the three most prominent exiles: Cicero, Ovid, and Seneca. By shifting focus to a discourse of exile and displacement in early Greek poetry, Greek historiography, Cynicism, consolatory literature, Latin epic, Greek literature of the empire, and Medieval Latin literature, the present volume questions the notion of a distinct, psychologically conditioned ‘genre’ or ‘mode’ of exile literature. It shows how ancient and medieval authors perceive and present their exile according to pre-existent literary paradigms, style themselves or others as ‘typical’ exiles, and employ ‘exile’ as a powerful trope to express estrangement, elicit readerly sympathy, and question political power structures.

Outlandish addresses geographical displacement as a lived experience in the twentieth century, as a predicament of writing, and as a problem for theory. It focuses on the work of three transnational writers from diverse backgrounds working in different genres: Joseph Conrad, the Ukrainian-born Polish novelist and storywriter living in Britain at the turn of the century; Theodor W. Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher and sociologist transplanted to Los Angeles during the Second World War; and Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British novelist and journalist, recently released from the peculiar conditions of his notorious houseless arrest. The author argues that Conrad, Adorno, and Rushdie emblematize significant shifts over the course of the century, from a modernist expression of almost universal deracination, to a post-Auschwitz disarticulation of home and subjectivity, to an emergent conceptualization of displacement in terms of migrancy, hybridity, and flow. He theorizes a mode of reading between exile and diaspora--two fundamentally different descriptions of displacement--and allows the "outlandish" writing of these three figures to complicate this seemingly continuous trajectory. Drawing on texts from literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and geography, the author explores what he calls the "rhetoric of displacement"--the struggle to assert identity out of place. He reads this writing predicament against the backdrop of the century's salient economic and technological changes, political upheavals, and mass migrations. In doing so, he draws attention to those aspects of exile and diaspora that have remained insufficiently considered: their relation to nationalism and colonialism, to authority and institutionality, and, above all, to broader questions of subjectivity, "race," location, and language, as these concepts themselves subtly change over the course of the century.

As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.

Introductory essays describe the interdisciplinary and comparative approach and explain how it overcomes methodological dead ends and advances the study of war in ancient and modern contexts. Following essays, written by scholars from various disciplines, explore specific cases drawn from a wide variety of ancient and modern settings and consider archaeological, anthropological, physical, and psychological realities, as well as biblical, literary, artistic, and iconographic representations of displacement and exile.

Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. Through an essentially literary lens, exile is examined both as physical departure from England-to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America-and as inner, mental withdrawal. In the process, a strikingly wide variety of contemporary sources comes under scrutiny, including letters, diaries, plays, treatises, translations and poetry. The extent to which the richness and disparateness of these modes of writing militates against or constructs a recognisable 'rhetoric' of exile is one of the book's overriding themes. Also under consideration is the degree to which exilic writing in this period is intended for public consumption, a product of private reflection, or characterised by a coalescence of the two. Importantly, this volume extends the chronological range of the English Revolution beyond 1660 by demonstrating that exile during the Restoration formed a meaningful continuum with displacement during the civil wars of the mid-century. This in-depth and overdue study of prominent and hitherto obscure exiles, conspicuously diverse in political and religious allegiance yet inextricably bound by the shared experience of displacement, will be of interest to scholars in a range of disciplines.

Exile as Forced Migrations injects cutting edge studies on forced migrations (DIDPS, IDPs, Refugee studies), displacement and resettlement, and generational issues that mark the exilic period (6th century B.C.E.). Founder and co-chair of the “Exile/Forced Migrations in Biblical Literature” (Society of Biblical Literature) and a member of the American Sociological Association (International Migration Section), Ahn furnishes biblical scholars with up-to-date sociological information to examine critically, the exile as forced migrations in the cadre of economics of migrations. Biblically speaking, Ahn isolates the three varying views on the exile. The 70 years in Babylon is cast as three and a half generations, with each Judeo-Babylonian generation (first-“1.5”-second-third) responding to its own set of issues and concerns (Ps 137, Jer 29, Isa 43, Num 32). This definitive work reframes the approach to study of the exilic period, as “generation-units”, sociologically, from the first forced migration in 597 B.C.E. to the first return migrations in 538 B.C.E. Exile as Forced Migrations goes beyond traditional emphasis on an important edifice and its institution. It rightfully returns to peoples in flight and plight.