Focusing on a significant 70-year period as a climactic phase of displacement, the book investigates the role of literature in producing new modes of representing and understanding migration in a global context. Globally felt and reported as a geographical, sociological, anthropological, and historical phenomenon, migration has produced an unprecedented corpus of literary narratives that demands to be approached through its own set of cross-disciplinary critical approaches. This Handbook explores tales of migration via a systematic study of the large corpus of Anglophone literary texts that have been written by migrant authors and/or on the topic of migration between 1946 and 2016—from the start of the United Nations International Migration Report to the first year in which the number of displaced people reached the level of the Second World War, marking a new phase in global migrations. Given the dominance of English as a world language, often used by writers who are not native speakers, the volume covers Anglophone writing, providing a substantially representative corpus that includes texts from or about Europe, Africa, North and Central America, and the South Asia and Pacific region. Starting from a critical approach that is inherently interdisciplinary, authors consider the notion of the border and how it has changed over time; show how traditional literary genres have morphed and hybridized to become suitable expressive tools for the new stories of migration; reflect on how the movement across borders and countries creates migrant identities that are not only linguistic but invests all aspects of one’s life and worldview; and includes authors’ voices (a small but representative group) to both justify and test the critical approaches proposed.
