Papers presented at a joint research conference of the European Science Foundation and Linköping University held in Vadstena, Sweden, May 12-16, 2007.

Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction / Theo D’haen -- European Literature: Simply a Higher Degree of Universality? / Pascale Casanova -- Toward a Literary Community? / Vladimir Biti -- What is Wrong with National Literature Departments? / Françoise Meltzer -- On the “Topographical Turn”: Concepts of Space in Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaften / Sigrid Weigel -- What is a European?: Letters from a European Americanist / Thomas Claviez -- From Atavism to Creolization: “Europeanness” in Contemporary Caribbean Discourse / Kristian Van Haesendonck -- European Literature(s) in the Global Context: Literatures for Europe / Ottmar Ette -- English and the Language of Others / Robert J.C. Young -- Multicultural or Multilingual Literature: A Swedish Dilemma? / Satu Gröndahl -- Turning East / Stephanos Stephanides -- Voices from Exile: A Literature for Europe? / John Neubauer -- A Gentleman Writer and His Sister: The Alternative Worlds of Beppe and Marisa Fenoglio / Mara Cambiaghi -- Writing ex patria: W.G. Sebald and the Construction of a Literary Identity / Gerhard Fischer -- Constructing European Identity in Fiction: Three Strategies / Christoph Parry -- Did we Stop Reading Poetry?: An Optimistic Approach to Cultural Pessimism / Wiljan van den Akker and Gillis Dorleijn -- Spanish Literature and the Recovery of Historical Memory / José M. González García -- Marginalization and Paradoxes of Identity Formation / Lisbeth Stenberg -- Europeanization and Regional Particularity: The Northern Lights Route and the Writings of Bengt Pohjanen / Anne Heith -- Byzantine Literature for Europe?: From Karelia to Istanbul with the Swedish Modernist Poet Gunnar Ekelöf / Helena Bodin -- Memories of the City: The Metropole as Significant Other in Elif Şafak’s Flea Palace and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul / Nagihan Haliloğlu -- On Literary Amnesia: Facing the Future / Reet Sool -- Literature and the Symbolic Engineering of the European Self / Monica Spiridon -- Contributors.

Available to subscribing member institutions only.

In Literature for Europe? leading scholars from around Europe reflect on the role played by literature, and by the study of literature, in the constant re-negotiation and re-construction of cultural identities in Europe implied by the accession to the European Union, in the early years of the twenty-first century, of fifteen new member states, with the accession of a number of Balkan states impending, and Turkey waiting in the wings, while at the same time transatlantic relations of the EU to the USA are hotly debated, in politics as in culture, China and India awake as economic giants, and globalization is upon us. At the same time, two of the earliest signatories to the treaties eventually leading to the European Union rejected a proposal for a European Constitution, and linguistic, religious, and ethnic dividing lines show even in some of Europe’s oldest nation states. How do literary texts, genres, and forms, thinking about them and teaching them, respond to and shape ongoing processes of European self-understanding in our era of globalization? The volume seeks to answer these questions by charting key developments in a number of fields crucial to the emergence of a European common literary “space”: literature and cultural value systems, literature and cultural memory, literary history, translation, the impact of the new media and the information age on matters of literature and identity, and the impact of the postcolonial. Literature for Europe? is a thought-provoking tour d’horizon of cutting-edge developments in the relationship between literary studies and “the matter of Europe,” and suggesting an exciting agenda for literary studies in Europe. It will be of interest to everyone working in European studies and/or European literature.