Introduction

Abstract

This book is about how a generation of writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century responded to the emergence of a new category of person in the world: the modern refugee whose history, as has recently become clear once more, is also the history of the changing meanings of political and national citizenship in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The introduction offers a critical review of how literary and legal history eventually ended up telling the same story about exile and statelessness in the post-war period: the exile, usually European, emerges as an individual of conscience and agency, a victim of persecution who, nonetheless, is of his time; and the exile’s others, the refugees, sometimes but usually not European, caught in the dehumanizing movements of mass displacement and whose existence is recognized neither by the humanism of human rights nor by literary history.