Literature and migration

Abstract

Migration and literature have been inextricably linked since antiquity at least when several authors, including Cicero, Ovid, and Seneca, lived in exile and discussed this topic in their works, anticipating many of the ideas that have pervaded migrant writing up to the present day (Gaertner 2007). Many large‐scale migratory movements over the last centuries also involved or produced writers. Such movements laid the basis for the literatures of the Americas and of Australia as we know them today – to the detriment of existing indigenous traditions – and for numerous diasporic literatures ranging from Jewish writing in Spanish America (Sosnowski 2004) to Korean writing in Japan (Kim 2005). But writers have also taken less‐trodden paths and chosen to live in exile in order to gain a critical distance from their home countries and to gather new impetus for their writing, as many American authors, such as Gertrude Stein or Ernest Hemingway, did in Paris during the interwar years (Green 2011).