Migration and Literature

Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad

This book sets out to explore migration and the concept’s explanatory
power in relation to four contemporary novelists. One of its working theses
is that migration is exactly what is both social and formal in their novels. As
Azade Seyhan remarks, descriptions referring to authorial background “such
as exilic, ethnic, migrant, or diaspora cannot do justice to the nuances of
writing between histories, geographies, and cultural practices.” 14 Hence,
migration is not only to be understood in relation to authorial biography.