Islam and Contemporary European Literature - by Carool Kersten (Hardcover)

About the Book

Examines the use of Islamic referents and themes in literary writings by European authors.

Book Synopsis

This book uses literary texts featuring themes and references related to Islam and the Muslim world to offer new perspectives on non-Western intellectual history and contemporary European literature. Shifting from abstraction to sublimation by highlighting individualized interpretations of religion by authors from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds, it asks how and why present-day European authors, from Albania, France, Germany, Spain and the former Yugoslavia, write fiction or fictionalized works that engage with Islamic religious themes and Europe's Islamic past. This thematic focus contributes to the interrogation of Eurocentric understandings of literary canons and points out ways of decolonizing the curriculum in the humanities by reading contemporary European literature through the lens of cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and in-betweenness.

Review Quotes

Islam and Contemporary European Literature is timely and needed. I think that this is an excellent book. There is no other monograph which traces the interaction of Muslim and non-Muslim literary voices, in several languages over particular forms of imagination, through a focus on individual praxis of religion and the civilisational aspects of Islam. It is extraordinary to see how Dr. Kersten has constructed a macro-analytical project which denies easy generalisations and looks with nuance at specific texts and affective entanglements.--Dilyana Mincheva, McMaster University

Exciting, intelligent, and learned, Carool Kersten's timely study guides his readers through a fascinating constellation of writers, texts, and ideas drawn from all over Europe to explore the relationship between Islam and Contemporary Literature. He demonstrates the poverty of fixed ideas about closed identities -especially in relation to religion-- along with the beauty and urgency of reckoning with porous borders, liminalities, and heterotopias through literature. As barriers are erected all over the world and the drumbeats of war grow louder, we should all, despite Kersten's modest closing sentence, read 'a book like this.'--Ziad Elmarsafy, University of St Andrews