Today, globalization, migration and political polarization complicate the individual’s search for a cohesive identity making identity formation and transformation key issues in everyday life. This collection of essays highlights a number of the dimensions of identity, including cultural hybridity, religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, sexuality, and childhood, and explores how they are thematized in different narratives.
The stories discussed are set in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Haiti, India, Israel, Japan, Polynesia, Norway, Romania, Spain and South Africa, emphasizing today’s international focus on identity. The majority of the contributions here focus on literary texts, while others investigate identity formations in interviews, language corpora, student reading logs, film, theatre and pathographies.
Contributors are:
Guri Ellen Barstad, Karen Patrick Knutsen and Elin Nesje Vestli: Introduction: The Search for Self: Continuity and Mutability
Identity and Cultural Hybridity
- Elin Nesje Vestli: “Brittle Identities”: Identity Discourses in the Work of Austrian Author Julya Rabinowich
- Grazziella Predoiu: Identity, Trauma and Language Confusion in Olga Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer der Birken liebt and Gott is nicht schütern
- Wayne Kelly: Fractured Boundaries, Cultural Hybridity and In-between Spaces in Norwegian Young Adult Immigrant Literature: Maria Navaroo Skaranger’s Alle utlendinger har lukka gardiner
Identity and Religion
- Guri Ellen Barstad: The Search for Authenticity: Religious Identity in the Norwegian Novel Guds tjener by Tor Edvin Dahl
- Melanie Duckworth: “My centre not my edge”. Uncanny Identity, Death, Doubles and Medievalism in Kevin Hart’s Your Shadow
- Mette Ramstad: The Israelite and Saint Identity according to Polynesian Latter-day Saints
Identity, Nationality and Language
- André Avias: The Weight of Collective Memory: Surviving in the Inhospitable Realm of Haiti
- Roxana Nubert and Ana-Maria Dascӑlu-Romiʈan: Identity, Migration and Language in Two Stories by the German-Speaking Writer Richard Wagner from Romania
- Annette M. Myre Jørgensen: Group Identity in Teenage Talk from Madrid
Identity, Profession and Gender
- Eva Lambertsson Björk, Jutta Eschenbach, Mathabo Khau and Lynette Webb: “It’s doable”: Women’s Journeys to Academia in South Africa and Their Sense of Self
- Karen Patrick Knutsen: Fiction as the “first laboratory of moral judgment”: Pre-service Teachers and the Development of a Professional Identity
- Gabriele C. Pfeiffer: Negotiating and Introducing Identities: The “Écriture Collective” of Ariane Mnouchkine, Hélène Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil
- Alessandra Schininà: Alienated and Evanescent Identities in the Contemporary World of Austrian Author Kathrin Röggla
- Jane M. Ekstam: How “the Other” becomes “Agent” through the Rupture of War: A New Look at Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs Novels
- Britt Andersen: In Search of the “message hidden in the beauty of the words”: Virginia Woolf’s Novel Mrs Dalloway
Identity and Illness
- Wladimir Chávez Vaca: Writing with One’s Eyes: Identity and Communicative Strategies in Masahiro Fujita’s 99% Thank You and Leo Montero’s Muñeca de trapo
Identity and Childhood
- Gro-Anita Myklevold: “Each homeless person has a different story to tell”: Homeless Identity in David Walliams’ Metafictive Childrens’ Book Mr Stink (2009)
- Britt W. Svenhard: “The right Alice”: A Cybertext Perspective on Narrated Identity in Film Adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Novels