For narrative and theme, space like time is a key element in the Fasti of Ovid as well as the Metamorphoses. After an initial exploration of the programmatic establishment of the theme of place in each poem, this chapter focuses on the thematic use of geography in the Fasti. The first section reflects on the prominence given to Rome’s physical and metaphorical place in the world: it is the city to which migrants travel, from which armies depart, to which victorious generals return with new sacra. The poem also treats Rome as urban space, and uses topography to help give meaning to sequences of adjacent temples and festivals. The final section touches on how Ovid’s own exile gives depth to the presentation both of Rome and of travel in the wider world: things are out of place.

Ovid’s journey towards Tomis is represented as a reversal of Aeneas’ destiny, particularly because – unlike the Virgilian hero – the exiled poet has to leave Rome (the world capital, and not a ruined city) with no promises of a glorious future. Thus, his new subjective elegy which originates at this (wild) periphery of the empire cannot but be a sad elegy. However, Ovid’s ‘eccentric’ exile poetry increasingly displays – from the Tristia to the Epistulae ex Ponto – some remarkable traces of evolution. In particular, towards the end of the second collection, the poet sketches a peculiar image of himself: that of an interethnic uates who has been able to find a new, unprecedented audience in the Greco-Getic tribes. The public role he now plays in Tomitan society allows him to engage in a sort of civilising mission as an imperial officer. Such a complex strategy of self-accreditation emphasises the transnational character of his poetry rather than its merely national dimension. The exile still remains a harsh experience for Ovid: nonetheless, he conceives the possibility of an evolution and cultivates the dream of gaining universal poetic renown even from the extreme boundaries of the world.

Music historiography has traditionally been based on ‘methodological nationalism’, the assumption that the nation state is the ‘natural’ context of analysis. As a result, migration tends to be treated as an exception to the rule of nationhood with its comforting myths of belonging and tradition. By contrast, this chapter argues that modernist music can be regarded as the music of exile. It focuses on the ‘normality of migration’, encompassing both forced and voluntary migration, and it covers areas such as the role of international composition teachers and the ‘dodecaphonic diaspora’, the way serialism came to be associated with resistance to fascism and migration. In addition to presenting individual case studies, it seeks to quantify the commonality of migration, using the composers performed at the Annual Festivals of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), as a statistical basis. What this demonstrates is that, although mobility may not be the norm, neither is it an exception. Furthermore, it is one of the ways in which the transnational network that is integral to musical modernism has come into being.

After three decades of vanguards there was a colloquial turn in Latin American poetry. Nicanor Parra’s Poemas y antipoemas, César Fernández Moreno’s Argentino hasta la muerte, Carlos Martínez Riva’s La insurrección solitaria and Neruda’s Odas elementales – all published in 1954 – show the abandonment of the oneiric in favor of a less fancy language and new links with popular culture. Juan Gelman’s Gotán (1962) is included in this trend. A decade later, exile marks an unexpected turn: Gelman will not only speak of defeat and death but will also impel exile and death on his lines: it is about not only the political in the poem but the politics of the poem. Therein resurfaces a key American issue: the need to construct a tradition. Gelman’s Hechos y relaciones (1980) and Citas y comentarios (1982) are contemporary with the first publications by Néstor Perlongher (Austria-Hungría, 1980; Alambres, 1987). With his Neobarroso, Perlongher proposes a relationship with the popular born of the curtailment in a domestic lexicon, an extolment of the kitsch and pop. Unlike Gelman, who finds in Europe the breadth of poetry, Perlongher discovers in Brazil the reciprocation of two systems, of Hispanic America and the Portuguese-speaking world.

In 1830, a group of forty officers and men from the recently deposed Federalist government of the province of Mendoza, in the Argentine Confederation, were massacred by their erstwhile Indigenous allies. The Federalists had sought asylum with Creole Loyalists to the Spanish Crown – exiled from southern Chile – who had facilitated the Federalist alliance with Indigenous groups. The massacre occurred at Chacay, in the south of present-day Mendoza, in what was then an Indigenous frontier zone. Though a relatively unimportant battle, it nonetheless highlights certain key dynamics of the complex political situation of post-independence South America. As the wars of independence spilled over into civil wars in Chile and the Río de la Plata, fluctuating alliances of émigrés and Indigenous groups continued to pose a cross-border threat to the newly independent political authorities. This chapter argues that exile played an important role in the process of border formation and the establishment of republican sovereignty in the region.

For Julius Wellhausen, the German biblical scholar best known for formulating “the documentary hypothesis,” prophecy served as a marker of religious authenticity. He portrays Ezekiel as denigrated, deceitful, and weak – the linchpin in the story of the transformation of ancient Israel from tribal vitality to priestly fossilization. Yet the carefully constructed scholarly story Wellhausen tells about ancient Israel is structured through fanciful Romantic dichotomies; he maligns scribal culture while evoking a nostalgia for an imaginary oral culture. Wellhausen was deeply influenced by the orientalist fantasies of writers like Goethe and Herder; furthermore, their melancholia about European writing culture continues to influence biblical scholarship’s (mis)understanding of prophecy. Moving away from Wellhausen, I ask how we could read Ezekiel’s weakness, specifically through his face-turning prophecies – not as “diminished” gestures of once-powerful mantic acts, but as creative, rhizomatic acts which expand the possibilities of the prophetic genre?

By necessity, immigrants must think, act, and live experimentally when they arrive at their new destination. Given that the essay also possesses an experimental quality, it is unsurprising to find that in the United States – often called the land of immigration – the essayistic canon includes a vast corpus of writing by immigrants. Indeed, the dual or multiple identity of an immigrant-essayist is one of the most common in American writing. This chapter is concerned with a particular group of such immigrant-essayists: those who arrived in the United States as a result of exile from Germany. It focuses particularly on Hans Richter, Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Kantorowicz, Thomas Mann, and Herbert Marcuse (as well as his student Angela Davis) who – like countless other artists, scholars, authors, directors, and other intellectuals – fled to the United States from war, persecution, and precarity in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. The final section explores the works of Christa Wolf, an author who grew up in socialist East Germany and whose visits to the United States before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain strongly influenced her essayistic writing.

There are several factors in the host country and the country of origin that might cause people to emigrate. Pre-existing historical contacts and a favourable economic situation in the country of destination are amongst the primary elements to influence migrants’ choices. This chapter will examine the political and economic developments in England, and in Flemish and Brabantine cities before the mid fourteenth century, and how they created the conditions for the migration of textile workers. It will be argued that the migratory process was driven by the prior intensity of trade relations, the existence of communication and transportation links, and the relative frequency of travel between the countries, as well as the political situation, which led to some involuntary migration too.

This book has examined the impact of the immigrant community on the English economy and the development of its cloth industry. The main hypothesis was to prove that Flemish immigrants had an influence on the development of the English textile industry, which grew exponentially from the mid fourteenth century. While several scholars have previously claimed that the number of textile workers from the Low Countries had probably not been higher than 200, we have seen throughout the book that at least 1,500 artisans immigrated to England between 1351 and 1381. This study has also gone beyond economic questions and touched upon the issues of social integration and cultural influence as well.

This chapter reconstructs Vicente Nogueira’s Inquisitorial trial, recovering the many political and religious motivations which lay behind it. Inquisitorial sources provide an opportunity to reflect on the interplay between Nogueira’s religious and sexual identities. Tried by the Inquisition for sodomy, Nogueira conceived his trial and subsequent exile as opportunities to reflect on his social statuses as someone who belonged to diverse intellectual, ecclesiastical, political and emotional communities. Despite the personal challenges posed by the trial and forced migration, these experiences ultimately provided Nogueira with more resources and greater public exposure as a mercenary of knowledge. Between his cell in Lisbon and the sugar mills of northern Brazil, Nogueira witnessed a set of conflicts that gave him access to the most unexpected spaces of the Republic of Letters.

As an academic and writer in England, W. G. Sebald’s intellectual baggage was distinctly German with only a small minority of texts explicitly devoted to Anglophone literature. Yet, the atmosphere that permeated his essayistic narratives was distinctly English. In that sense, Sebald occupied a literary space in the in-between, oscillating between times past and times present. This article examines in three steps Sebald’s approach to this space in terms of thematic scope, style and perspectives that characterized his German wanderings in England. It assesses the interplay of memory and imagination in this creative process firmly located in this space of overlapping concerns, mainly rooted in the experience of exile, both real and, in his own case, simulated.

This essay introduces key issues relating to the translation of Sebald’s work into English and to his international reception in general. It shows how the reception of Sebald’s work in translation led to his canonization as “Holocaust author”, due in part to the sequence but also due to the tone of the translations. The essay discusses Sebald’s personal interest in translation practices and his heavy involvement in the English translations of his own work. It shows how Sebald might change the meaning in translated versions because of issues he identified with the German originals, and how his interventions and revisions impacted on his collaboration with the translators. In addition to the grammatical complexity of the German language, Sebald’s writing poses specific problems for the translator, such as the inclusion of very long sentences, regionalisms, unacknowledged citations, and a syntax and style partially modelled on nineteenth-century writers. The essay concludes with a discussion of untranslatability concerning Sebald’s use of troublesome vocabulary, such as the Nazi Jargon in Austerlitz or the offensive term ‘Neger’ (‘negro’) in The Emigrants.