This book places transcultural memory in the South Asian cultural and literary context. Divided into two parts, the book first defines transcultural memory in the age of globalised modernity both as a theory and social practice. Then it examines contemporary Indo-English novels from India and Pakistan with the theoretical and methodological tool of transcultural memory to shed new light on the connection between memory and modernity, and memory and South Asian cultures in the wake of new social and political transformations on the Indian subcontinent. A special focus on commemorative tropes in the novels not only show the possibility of a dialogue with different versions of the past, but also how such a dialogue shapes processes of remembrance between and beyond borders. Hence, the books comes up with alternative ways of reading the Indo-English novels, divesting the concept of (trans)cultural memory from its Euro- centrism and claiming it as equally significant in comprehending the new configurations of memory and modernity in non-Western locations.

This book places transcultural memory in the South Asian cultural and literary context. Divided into two parts, the book first defines transcultural memory in the age of globalised modernity both as a theory and social practice. Then it examines contemporary Indo-English novels from India and Pakistan with the theoretical and methodological tool of transcultural memory to shed new light on the connection between memory and modernity, and memory and South Asian cultures in the wake of new social and political transformations on the Indian subcontinent. A special focus on commemorative tropes in the novels not only show the possibility of a dialogue with different versions of the past, but also how such a dialogue shapes processes of remembrance between and beyond borders. Hence, the books comes up with alternative ways of reading the Indo-English novels, divesting the concept of (trans)cultural memory from its Euro- centrism and claiming it as equally significant in comprehending the new configurations of memory and modernity in non-Western locations.

Up until fairly recently, memory used to be mainly considered within the frames of the nation and related mechanisms of group identity. Building on mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, this form of memory focused on the event as a central category of meaning making. Taking its cue from a number of Anglophone novels, this book examines the indeterminate traces of memories in literary texts that are not overtly concerned with memory but still latently informed by the past. More concretely, it analyzes novels that do not directly address memories and do not focus on the event as a central meaning making category. Relegating memory to the realm of the latent, that is the not-directly-graspable dimensions of a text, the novels that this book analyses withdraw from overt memory discourses and create new ways of re-membering that refigure the temporal tripartite of past, present and future and negotiate what is ‘memorable’ in the first place. Combining the analysis of the novels’ overall structure with close readings of selected passages, this book links latency as a mode of memory with the productive agency of formal literary devices that work both on the micro and macro level, activating readers to challenge their learned ways of reading for memory.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

Though still a relatively young field, memory studies has undergone significant transformations since it first coalesced as an area of inquiry. Increasingly, scholars understand memory to be a fluid, dynamic, unbound phenomenon—a process rather than a reified object. Embodying just such an elastic approach, this state-of-the-field collection systematically explores the transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary dimensions of memory—four key dynamics that have sometimes been studied in isolation but never in such an integrated manner. Memory Unbound places leading researchers in conversation with emerging voices in the field to recast our understanding of memory’s distinctive variability.

This book examines how the transcultural and transnational migration of people, texts, and ideas has transformed the paradigm of national literature, with Britain and Ireland as case studies. The study questions definitions of migration and migrant literature that focus solely on the work of authors with migrant backgrounds, and suggests that migration is not extraneous but intrinsic to contemporary understandings of national literature in a global context. The fictional work of authors such as Caryl Phillips, Colum McCann, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Rose Tremain, Elif Shafak, and Evelyn Conlon is analysed from a variety of perspectives, including transculturality, cosmopolitanism, and Afropolitanism, so as to emphasise how their work fosters an understanding of national literature, as well as of individual and collective identities, based on transborder interconnectivity.

Due to the large-scale global transformations of the 20th century, migration literature has become a vibrant genre over the last decades. In these novels, issues of transcultural identity and belonging naturally feature prominently. This study takes a closer look at the ways in which the idea of family informs processes of identity construction. It explores changing roles and meanings of the diasporic family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting in order to identify the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in this context. This book builds on insights from different fields of family research (e.g. sociology, psychology, communication studies, memory studies) to provide a conceptual framework for the investigation of synchronic and diachronic family constellations and connections. The approach developed in this study not only sheds new light on contemporary British migration literature but can also prove fruitful for analyses of families in literature more generally. By highlighting the relevance and multifaceted nature of doing family, this study also offers new perspectives for transcultural memory studies.