Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought deals with the concept of exile on many levels-from the literal to the metaphorical. It combines analyses of predominantly Jewish authors of Central Europe of the twentieth century who are not usually connected, including Kafka, Kraus, Levi, Lustig, Wiesel, and Frankl. It follows the typical routes that exiled writers took, from East to West and later often as far as America. The concept and forms of exile are analyzed from many different points of view and great importance is devoted especially to the forms of inner exile. In Forms of Exile in Jewish Literature and Thought, Bronislava Volkova, an exile herself and thus intimately familiar with the topic through her own experience, develops a unique typology of exile that will enrich the field of intellectual and literary history of twentieth-century Europe and America.

About the Author

Bronislava Volkova is a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collagist, essayist and Professor Emerita of Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, where she was a Director of the Czech Program at the Slavic Department for thirty years. She is a member of the Czech and American PEN Club. She went into exile in 1974, taught at the Universities of Cologne and Marburg and subsequently at Harvard University and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She has published eleven books of existential and metaphysical poetry in Czech and seven bilingual editions illustrated with her own collages. She is also the author of two books on linguistic and literary semiotics, Emotive Signs in Language (John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1987) and A Feminist's Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature (Edwin Mellen Press, N.Y., 1997), as well as the leading co-author of a large anthology of Czech poetry translations, Up The Devil's Back: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Czech Poetry (with Clarice Cloutier, Slavica Publishers, 2008). Her scholarly publications include topics of Czech poetry, Czech popular culture, issues of exile, gender, implied author values and emotive signs. Her poetry has been translated into twelve languages and her selected poems appeared in book form in six of them. She has also received a number of literary and cultural awards.

Reviews

"In this book of essays [the author] creates an original and ingenious typology of the forms of exile. Her grasp of this phenomenon is unusually inventive, not only as a result of her long-term study, but also through personal experience of more than forty years of exile... It is a book that stimulates and inspires many thoughts and developments. It is appropriate not only for academic readers, but also for a general public interested in questions of exile. It could also be fruitfully used as a textbook in literature courses covering central European literature of the period."

- Vera Hoffmannova, Modern Language Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781644695906
Author Bronislava Volkov
Format Paperback
Page Count 120
Imprint Academic Studies Press
Publisher Academic Studies Press