About The Political Novel in Europe and Migration/Exile

The project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe” (CAPONEU) examines how literature, and the novel in particular, addresses political issues in different national and cultural contexts and thus contributes to shaping European societies and politics in the 21st century. What we call and defend as the political novel is currently gaining importance not only in strictly defined literary circles, but also in European societies as a whole.

This Collection brings together selected contributions to the CAPONEU research workshop “Political Novel in Europe and Migration/Exile” which took place in Poznań from 23 to 24 May 2024. The participants addressed the issue of migration and exile in the political novel in Europe, as well as the question of how the novel portrays its causes and effects (geopolitical, social, identity-related, etc.) and presents the phenomena of various exoduses in the context of democracy and authoritarianism. The subject of literary and interdisciplinary analysis were novels dealing with the problem of (e)migration (for economic, political, military, climatic reasons), banishment, exile, refugee trauma (caused by war), as well as the phenomena of statelessness, nomads and ‘identity’ migrations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Main methodological and theoretical backgrounds were post-migration, new temporality studies, cryptic theory, epistemic resistance, travel writing, affective turn, otherness, class distinctions, theories of labor.

This Collection is part of a series of CAPONEU Collections - the sister Collections can be found below:

• What is the Political Novel? Defining the Genre
• The Political Novel in Historiographical and Sociological Perspective: Structures and Analogies
• The Political Novel Through the Lens of Gender