Narratives Crossing Borders: The Dynamics of Cultural Interaction

Which is the identity of a traveler who is constantly on the move between cultures and languages? What happens with stories when they are transmitted from one place to another, when they are retold, remade, translated and re-translated? What happens with the scholars themselves, when they try to grapple with the kaleidoscopic diversity of human expression in a constantly changing world?

These and related questions are explored in the chapters of this collection. Its overall topic, narratives that pass over national, language and ethnical borders includes studies about transcultural novels, poetry, drama, and the narratives of journalism. There is a broad geographic diversity, not only in the collection as a whole, but also in each of the single contributions. This in turn demands a multitude of theoretical and methodological approaches, which cover a spectrum of concepts from such different sources as post-colonial studies, linguistics, religion, aesthetics, art, and media studies, often going beyond the well-known Western frameworks.

The works of authors like Miriam Toews, Yoko Tawada, Javier Moreno, Leila Abouela, Marguerite Duras, Kyoko Mori, Francesca Duranti, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Rībi Hideo, and François Cheng are studied from a variety of perspectives. Other chapters deal with code-switching in West African novels, border crossing in the Japanese noh drama, translational anthologies of Italian literature, urban legends on the US-Mexico border, migration in German children's books, and war trauma in poetry. Most of the chapters are case studies of specific works and authors, and may thus be of interest, not only for specialists, but also for the general reader.

Herbert Jonsson received his PhD in Japanology from Stockholm University in 2006. He is associate professor of Japanese at Dalarna University, Sweden, where he has taught Japanese language and literature since 2007. His main field of research has been Japanese haikai poetry and the theory of verse linking in the 17th and 18th centuries. He has published articles on the poetics of classical haikai and a monograph on the linked poetry of Yosa Buson. At present, he is working on a research project about the poetics of sketching in modern and contemporary Japanese haiku by female poets.

Lovisa Berg is a senior lecturer of Arabic at Dalarna University and the head of the Arabic department. She has a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies from Edinburgh University (2017) where she wrote on the topic of masculinity formulation in the fiction of Syrian female writers during the 20th century. Her main research topics are modern Syrian literature, Syrian drama series and gender studies. She teaches Arabic literature and language on both undergraduate and graduate level.

Chatarina Edfeldt is a senior lecturer of Portuguese and a member of the Literature, Identity and Transculturality research group at Dalarna University. She is a member of research program "Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature" (Sweden) and of the research group "Intersexualities" at ILCML (Institute of Comparative Literature) at the University of Porto. Her research focuses on Portuguese-speaking literature and culture, and World literature from a Feminist, Gender and Post-colonial perspective. She has published books and articles on the topics of gender issues, literary historiography and Portuguese-speaking women writers. Her most recent book is a co-edited volume Northern Crossing: The Literary Semi-periphery as an Area of Transition (forthcoming Bloomsbury).