Languages of Exile examines the relationship between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century literature. Like no period before it, the last century was marked by the experience of expatriation, forcing exiled writers to confront the fact of linguistic difference. Literary writing can be read as the site where that confrontation is played out aesthetically at the intersection between native and acquired language, between indigenous and alien, between self and other in a complex multilingual dynamic specific to exile and migration.
The essays collected here...