The Oxford Book of Exile

Cover Art for 9780192142214, The Oxford Book of Exile by John Simpson
ISBN: 9780192142214
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 31 March, 1995
Format: Hardback
Links Australian Libraries (Trove)

From the moment Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, exile has been a part of the human experience. The circumstances in which individuals or entire peoples are compelled to leave their homeland are as various as they are numerous, and how people react to exile also varies widely. Think of the wit of Alexander Herzen, or the quiet despair of Oscar Wilde, sitting outside the Cafe' de Flore in the Boulevard St. Germain in the hope that someone will pay for his coffee, or the comfortable life of Sir Richard and Lady Burton in their garconnerie in Trieste, or the angst of Albert Camus, or the wanderings of Jack Kerouac. Now, in The Oxford Book of Exile, John Simpson has brought together examples of exile from all over the world, and from all periods of history. Here is an intense record of the experience of exile, with writers from Ovid to Solzhenitsyn describing their emotions, their struggle, and their despair. For those who have chosen a life in exile, Simpson shows how the response is more mixed: ambivalence about the country they have left and the country they have chosen suffuses the writing of these intellectuals. We read of literary expatriates, such as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, and James Joyce. There is also the happy life of exiles in utterly foreign places, such as Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa or Paul Gauguin in Tahiti. And those persecuted for their faith--such as the Pilgrims at Plymouth or the Ayatolla

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