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This volume assesses the importance of border crossings in the evolution of European culture and identity, as reflected in the work of modern European writers and film-makers. Contributors chart the processes of transition from stability to change, from the known to the culturally unsettled, treating the themes of migration, exile, allegiance and belonging, journey, marginality, the legacy of war and displacement, memory and the denial of memory. What emerges is a cross-disciplinary reappraisal of the concept of identity, in which fixity is replaced by movement, and in which the dynamic process of story-telling, with its narratives of migration, exile, and borders crossed, mirrors the shifting and nomadic pluralities of modern existence.
List of contents
Contents: Peter Wagstaff: Introduction: Mapping Identities - Anne White: Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and 'Border Crossings' in The File on H and Other Novels by Ismail Kadare - Wendy Everett: 'Between Here and There, Between Then and Now': The Theme of Border Crossings in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos - Dennis Tate: Travelling on the S-Bahn: German Border Crossings before and after Unification - Renate Rechtien: Living with Shadows: Issues of Memory and Identity in Austria and in Elisabeth Reichart's February Shadows - Mary Besemeres: Lost in Translations? Eva Hoffman and Tim Parks - Kathryn Crameri: Constructing a Bridge between Cultures: Catalan Cultural Policy and the New Immigration - David Gillespie: 'One Drop Plus One Drop Makes One Bigger Drop, Not Two': Convergence and Isolation in Andrei Tarkovskii's Nostalgia - Olga Tabachnikova: Alexander Galich: Life and Songs - Crossing Borders - Brian Neve: From Exile to Expatriate: Class and Genre in Joseph Losey's Early British Films - Peter Wagstaff: Storytelling: John Berger's Narrative Journeys in To the Wedding.
About the author
The Editor: Peter Wagstaff is Senior Lecturer in French and European Studies at the University of Bath. Publications include
Memory and Desire: Rétif de la Bretonne, Autobiography and Utopia (1996),
Regionalism in the European Union (1999) and
Cultures of Exile: Images of Displacement (co-editor, Berghahn, 2004).
