This book argues that increasingly transnational reading contexts of the twenty-first century
place new pressures on fundamental questions about how we read literary fiction. Prompted by
the stylistic strategies of three European émigré writers of the twentieth century - Conrad
Weiss and Sebald - it demonstrates the need to pose more differentiated questions about
specific effects that occur when literary narratives meet a readership with a heterogeneous
historical imaginary. In conversation with reception theory trauma theory and transnational
and postcolonial studies the study shows how historical pressures in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries require comparative literature to address not only implied but also
various unimplied reading positions that engage history in displaced yet material ways. This
book opens new analytical paths for thinking about literary texts as media of historical
imagination and conceiving relations between incommensurable historical events and contexts.
Challenging overly global and overly local readings alike the book presents a sophisticated
contribution to discussions on how to reform the discipline of comparative literature in the
twenty-first century.
