Edges, Borders, Peripheries: Contested European Imaginaries and Narrative Forms

Abstract

This introductory essay confronts the idea of Europe and Europeanness fromthe standpoint of global literary studies. It makes the case for a pluralisticconception of world literature through a prospective analysis of the literaryEuropean semi-periphery. With the aim of overcoming the conflationbetween world literature and the global anglophone (as much as that ofEurope and the West), we draw on previous research on the European semi-periphery and its “small/minor” literatures with three main goals in mind: tobetter understand the contentious relationship between less-circulatedEuropean narratives and world literature; to explore the contested imagin-aries of Europe and Europe’s border zones that these fictions produce; and,lastly, to identify a constellation of thematic, generic, formal, and affectiveconcerns that contribute to reimagining Europe through specific exploratorypoetics. Through the examination of this framework, the essay criticallyinterrogates and problematizes the idea of Europe from its margins andexplores the ways in which narrative form can contribute to contestingunitary ideas around a multilayered and conflicted European literary field.