Voices from Exile: A Literature for Europe?

Exile, for all of its pain and suffering, has offered European writers a way to step out of their national linguistic and cultural environment. Did exiled writers make use of this opportunity, and start writing a ‘literature for Europe’? By no means all did; many of them sealed themselves off in order to maintain the purity of their mother tongue, while others ‘opened up’ and adjusted to the culture of their host country, often even by adopting its language for their writing. Considering these questions, Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres1 is of great help, although her models are Joyce, Beckett, and other writers, who were not exiles in a literal sense. Many ‘genuine’ exiles retained the national mentality of their youth.