From Rupture to Refuge

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open intiative.

From Rupture to Refuge is a wide-ranging study of both contemporary refugee fiction and memoir. From international best-selling novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and Christi Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo, to memoirs by Zoya Phan and Clemantine Wamariya, it follows refugees as they narrate their experiences and memories of homeland, war, escape, camp, and finally finding refuge.

Tracing literary connections between this wide body of 21st Century writing, the book provides an overview of a genre of writing and a detailed textual analyses of thematic and poetic intersections. It also introduces the concept of ‘narrative displacement’, uncovering the ways in which refugees are discursively displaced from their own tales as well as being displaced spatially. Sloane argues that in writing and recording, refugees replace themselves at the centre of their own life stories.

From Rupture to Refuge will be of particular interest to scholars of refugee writing, migration studies and displacement, as well as life writing and contemporary fiction more broadly.

Peter Sloane is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Buckingham, specialising in prose fiction and non-fiction, as well as global cinema.