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An original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. Zweig was also an intellectual and a lover of all the arts, high and low. Yet after Hitler’s rise to power, this celebrated writer who had dedicated so much energy to promoting international humanism plummeted, in a matter of a few years, into an increasingly isolated exile—from London to Bath to New York City, then Ossining, Rio, and finally Petrópolis—where, in 1942, in a cramped bungalow, he killed himself. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig’s extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era—the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization.

London, 1934. Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner dominated the British theatre scene, poet and director Berthold Viertel shot two successful films for Gaumont British; two great actors from the Weimar era, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner, became well-known faces in English-speaking cinema and the Hungarian journalist Stefan Lorant launched the first ever continental-style illustrated magazine for the British newspaper market. Exploring a phase in the history of Anglo-German relations during which the émigrés from Hitler's Germany were making their influence felt in Britain, Daria Santini traces their presence in London from around 1933 to 1935 when these characters made their presence truly felt, all while the Nazi threat loomed on the horizon.

Luggage is an overlooked detail in the stock sketch of the expatriated modernist writer from the valise-fashioned desks of both James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov to the lost manuscript-laden cases of Ernest Hemingway and Walter Benjamin. While the trope of modernist exile has long been spotlighted, little attention has been given to the material meaning of this condition. What things and objects do modernism's exiles and emigres carry with them and how does the act of carriage enter into the modernist picture more broadly? What are the implications and historical resonances of a portable outlook, particularly from the angles of gender, wartime conflict and character conception? Above all, how far does such an outlook impact upon artistic vision? Portability represents the simultaneous transportation and repudiation of domesticity and the home, those key frames of reference in the nineteenth-century novel. This book examines the multifarious ways in which the emergence of a modern culture of portability prompts a radical, if often problematic, departure from Victorian architectural conceptions of fiction towards more movable understandings of form and character.

This book presents an essential contribution to approaches in the studies of film, literature, performance, translation, and other art forms within the Chinese cultural tradition, examining East-West cultural exchange and providing related intertextual dialogue. The assessment of cultural exchange in the East-West context involves the original source, the adapted text, and other enigmatic extras incurred during the process. It aims to evaluate the linkage among, but not limited to, literature, film, music, art, and performance. The sections unpack how canonical texts can be read anew in modern society; how ideas can be circulated around the world based on translation, adaptation, and reinvention; and how the global networks of circulation can facilitate cultural interaction and intervention. The authors engage discussions on longstanding debates and controversies relating to Chinese literature as world literature; reconciliations of cultural identity under the contemporary waves of globalization and glocalization; Chinese-Western film adaptations and their impact upon cinematic experiences; an understanding of gendered roles and voices under the social gaze; and the translation of texts from intertextual angles. An enriching intellectual, intertextual resource for researchers and students enthusiastic about the adaptation and transformation process of different genres, this book is a must-have for Sinophiles. It will appeal to world historians interested in the global networks of connectivity, scholars researching cultural life in East Asia, and China specialists interested in cultural studies, translation, and film, media and literary studies.

Sheds new light on the views and attitudes of Latin American writers during the Nazi era

“Loneliness is everywhere these days. But this book will chase some of it away, and maybe replace it with connection.” —Patton Oswalt, Emmy and Grammy winning comic An examination of the life and work of six brilliant minds of the twentieth century, intent on answering the question “What can be done not despite but because of loneliness?” At an unprecedented rate, loneliness is moving around the globe—from self-isolating technology and political division to community decay and social fragmentation—and yet it is not a feeling to which we readily admit. It is stigmatized, freighted with shame and fear, and easy to dismiss as mere emotional neediness. But what if instead of shying away from loneliness, we embraced it as something we can learn from and as something that will draw us closer to one another? In This Exquisite Loneliness, Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Within the back stories to Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston’s literary and ethnographic writing, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans’s photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele’s revolutionary artwork and Rod Serling’s uncanny narratives in The Twilight Zone, Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century. This singular meditation on loneliness reveals how we might transform the pain of emotional isolation and become more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.