Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture (Studies in European Cultural Transition)

This lively and intellectually vigorous conspectus of studies approaches the subject of exile from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The contributions to this volume give due attention to the twentieth century migratory phenomena, theorised by Edward Said, Julia Kristeva and Salman Rushdie. They also show that the discourse and experience of exile is not the stuff of modernity alone. The volume illustrates that the waning of the Middle Ages, Reformation and Restoration politics, and the importation of Egyptian mummies into a nineteenth-century England hungry for imperial exotica reveal displacement, dislocation, otherness and the uncanniness of observing strangers-on-display to have long been part of European cultural currency. The essays range across a variety of disciplines: literary studies, modern languages, history of science, philosophy and museum studies.