This book is a study of the complexities and ambiguities of exile, a topical subject which has been very much in vogue since the 1990s. In her readings of Joseph Conrad`s "Amy Foster" (1903), Vladimir Nabokov`s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938), and Eva Hoffman`s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), Stefana Roussenova pursues a twofold aim: she outlines the "hi/story" of exile and at the same time identifies a body of stylistic and formal features of migrant writing, independent of the respective country or culture of origin that could contribute to a “poetics of exile.” Apart from the conscious choice of three historical turning points and different genres, Stefana Roussenova selects authors in whose texts innovation plays an essential role and traces their links with modernism and postmodernism.
In her endeavour to define a “poetics of exile”, the author identifies three narrative strategies for the representation of exile which, she argues, develop on the common ground of “doubling”, a technique which determines the respective plots, settings, and constellations of protagonists as well as the micro-structure of the texts through the choice of tropes. “Doubling” and binarism mirror the relationship between the exile's lost past and his present, but, at the same time, they are subverted by a multitude of narrative techniques and strategies: the untranslatability of emotions, for instance, allows for the ludic insertion of words in the mother tongue, for intertextuality, pastiche, and parody; the exiled protagonists eventually turn out to be hybrid characters transformed into a script, a letter or a mask, and the use of the present tense for different temporal strata deactivates the clear separation of past and present.
