Has thinking, working and teaching in terms of national literatures become obsolete in today’s globalized world of hyphenated languages, literatures and cultures? Since the rise of modern European national philologies coincided with the emergence of modern European nation-states, does the dissolution of the latter in the European supranational unity imply the suspension of the former? Or we must, on the contrary, consider the fact that today’s Europe is not only postnational but, in its re-nationalized East-Central-European part, post-multinational as well, i.e., emerging out of the breakdown of the postimperial state formations such as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia?

The book presents Winfried Georg Sebald and Ian McEwan as paradigmatic post-imperial writers who enmeshed in the hierarchies of power inherited from their imperial times, strive to disentangle themselves from that burdensome legacy. To achieve this, they undertake a subtle detachment from the analogously implicated subject positions of their protagonists. In Sebald’s works, these positions are closer to the historical victims of the Third Reich who used to suppress their past experiences, whereas in McEwan’s works, they incline toward the systemic ‘beneficiaries’ of the British Empire who used to overlook their present privileges. However, in distinction to their protagonists’ denied involvements, both authors recognize their implication in their protagonists’ pasts and presents. Such a detachment from familiar protagonists requires the consent of unknown and scattered readers with whom they forge a long-distance solidarity, connective association or complicitous alliance. Thus, to exempt themselves from one complicity, they enter another one.

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

Memory in the Balkans has often been described as binding, authoritative, and non-negotiable, functioning as a banner of war. This book challenges such a one-dimensional representation and offers a more nuanced analysis that accommodates frequently ignored instances of transnational solidarity, dialogue, communal mourning and working through a difficult past. Exploring a broad range of memorial practices, the book focuses on the ways in which cultural memory is mediated, performed and critically reworked by literature and the arts in the former Yugoslavia. Against the methodological nationalism of works that study Serbian, Croatian, or Bosniak culture as self-contained, this book examines post-Yugoslav literature, film, visual culture, and politicized art practices from a supranational angle. Not solely focusing on traumatic memories, but also exploring how post-Yugoslav cultural practices mobilize memory for a politics of hope, this volume moves beyond the trauma paradigm that still dominates memory studies. In its scope and approach, the book shows the relevance of the cultural memory of Eastern European citizens and the contribution they can offer to the building of Europe’s shared cultural memory and transnational identity.

Until now, there has been little scholarly attention given to the ways in which Eastern European Holocaust fiction can contribute to current debates about transnational and transgenerational memory. Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literary narratives about the Holocaust offer a particularly interesting case because time and again Holocaust memory is represented as intersecting with other stories of extreme violence: with the suffering of the non-Jewish South-Slav population during the Second World War, with the fate of victims of Stalinist terror, and with the victims of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. This book examines the emergence and transformations of Holocaust memory in the socialist Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav eras. It discusses literary texts about the Holocaust by Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav writers, situating their oeuvre in the historical and discursive context in which it emerged and paying attention to its reception at the time. The book shows how in the writing of different generational groups (the survivor generation, the 1.5, and the second and third generations), the Holocaust is a motif for understanding the nature of extreme violence, locally and globally. The book offers comparative studies of several authors as well as readings of the work of individual writers. It uncovers forgotten authors and discusses internationally well-known and translated authors such as Danilo Kiš and David Albahari. By focusing on work by Jewish and non-Jewish authors of three generations, it sheds light on the ethical and aesthetical aspects of the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust memory in the Yugoslav context. As such, this book will appeal to both students and scholars of Holocaust studies, cultural memory studies, literary studies, cultural history, cultural sociology, Balkan studies, and Eastern European politics.

Homeland, Exile, Imagined Homelands are features of the modern experience and relate to the cultural and historical dilemmas of loss, nostalgia, utopia, travel, longing, and are central for Jews and others. This book is an exploration into a world of boundary crossings and of desired places and alternate identities, into a world of adopted kin and invented allegiances.

Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.

The most detailed and wide-ranging comparative study to date of how European literatures written in less well known languages try, through translation, to reach the wider world, rejecting the predominant narrative of tragic marginalization with case studies of endeavour and innovation from nineteenth-century Swedish women’s writing to twenty-first-century Polish fantasy.

With the Treaty of Versailles, the Western nation-state powers introduced into the East Central European region the principle of national self-determination. This principle was buttressed by frustrated native elites who regarded the establishment of their respective nation-states as a welcome opportunity for their own affirmation. They desired sovereignty but were prevented from accomplishing it by their multiple dispossession. National elites started to blame each other for this humiliating condition. The successor states were dispossessed of power, territories, and glory. The new nation-states were frustrated by their devastating condition. The dispersed Jews were left without the imperial protection. This embarrassing state gave rise to collective (historical) and individual (fictional) narratives of dispossession. This volume investigates their intended and unintended interaction. Contributors are: Davor Beganović, Vladimir Biti, Zrinka Božić-Blanuša, Marko Juvan, Bernarda Katušić, Nataša Kovačević, Petr Kučera, Aleksandar Mijatović, Guido Snel, and Stijn Vervaet.