Discourses on Nations and Identities (The Many Languages of Comparative Literature)

Hardcover, x + 603 pages, NOT ex-library. Weight over 1kg. Great internally, small areas of handling damage on the boards. Book is fresh, clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. A short edge-nick & creases to the upper spine; a touch of wear to the tips of board corners. Issued without a dust jacket. -- A comparative literature panorama of how language shapes identity and nationhood across war, migration, and censorship - from World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and the Partition of India to exophony in Turkish‑German and francophone writing, rhizomatic memory, and the languages of biography - showing how linguistic practice becomes a site of political struggle and cultural reinvention. -- This comparative literature collection maps how language mediates identity and nation‑making across war, migration, and censorship. Chapters analyze discourse around the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Partition of India, and probe mechanisms of exclusion and ideological control from post‑Revolutionary France and 19th‑century Mexico to Soviet Georgia and Communist Romania. A second cluster examines hybridity, exophony, and code‑switching in Turkish‑German and francophone writing (e.g., Zafer Senocak, Terézia Mora, Assia Djebar, Tahar Ben Jelloun) and in North American contexts (Spanglish, Canadian popular culture; diasporic authors such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston). Other chapters rethink cultural memory through the rhizome and explore distinctive linguistic milieus, including modernist ethnographies of "Brazil‑language" (a modernist national‑language concept). The volume also interrogates the languages of life‑writing - from Virginia Woolf to nonhuman life‑writing and the curriculum vitae - and representations of otherness across media (disability on stage, women athletes in sports media, dynamics of otherness in Israeli society). Bringing together literary, cultural, and historical analysis, the book offers a multifaceted account of how language becomes the site where individual and collective identities are articulated, contested, and reimagined. Of interest to scholars of comparative literature, cultural studies, memory studies, and media studies.…