1st Edition
Imaginary Europes Literary and filmic representations of Europe from afar
Introduction – Imaginary Europes, phantoms of the past, conceptions of the future? Elisabeth Bekers, Maggie Ann Bowers and Sissy Helff
1. Fragile balance: Imaginary Europes, transcultural aesthetics and discourses of European identity in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse Sissy Helff
2. British imaginings of a European periphery: Roger Scruton, Michael Palin and Michael Booth in/on Finland Jopi Nyman
3. Bursting the bubble: Mythical Englishness, then and now Christine Berberich
4. Wanton and sensuous in the Musée du Quai Branly: Gerald Vizenor’s cosmoprimitivist visions of France James Mackay
5. Asia’s Europes: Anti-colonial attitudes in the novels of Ondaatje and Shamsie Maggie Ann Bowers
6. Long distance Afrikaners: Afrikaans literature and dislocated identity in a European context Margriet van der Waal
7. Writing back or writing off? Europe as "tribe" and "traumascape" in works by Caryl Phillips and Christos Tsiolkas Janine Hauthal
Biography
Elisabeth Bekers is Professor of British and Postcolonial Literature at Vrije Universiteit
Brussel, Belgium. She researches literature from Africa and its diaspora, and currently
focuses on black British women’s writing. Her publications include the co-edited volumes
Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2009) and Brussel schrijven/
Écrire Bruxelles (2016).
Maggie Ann Bowers is a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of
Portsmouth, UK. Her research covers contemporary postcolonial studies, focusing particularly
on Native American studies and comparative multi-ethnic literatures of North
America. She is the author of Magic(al) Realism (2004). Her recent research has examined
the links between storytelling, ritual, and law and sovereignty in Native American writing.
Sissy Helff is a freelance anglicist with a broad range of interests in Anglophone world
literature, postcolonial and transcultural studies, visual culture, history, and politics. Her
recent book, Unreliable Truths: Transcultural Homeworlds in Indian Women’s Fiction of
the Diaspora (2012), is an overview of Indian diasporic women’s writing from around the
world.
