The Semiotics of Exile in Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Hong Zeng

   Pages 1-5

3. Semiotics of Exile in Photography

   • Hong Zeng

   Pages 7-32

4. Poetics of Exile

   • Hong Zeng

   Pages 33-89

5. Semiotics of Exile in Tragedy

   • Hong Zeng

   Pages 91-113

6. E’criture Feminine and the Semiotics of Exile

   • Hong Zeng

   Pages 115-128

7. Cosmic Exile and the Fourth Dimension in Escher, Borges, and Proust

   • Hong Zeng

   Pages 129-139

8. Artist in Exile

   • Hong Zeng

   Pages 141-163

9. Back Matter

   Pages 165-179

   PDF

Furthering the scholarship on writers and artists as diverse as Lord Byron, Edvard Munch, Sylvia Plath, and Jorge Luis Borges, Zeng probes the semiotics of exile.  In artistic traditions the world over, exile exerts a potent and complex mythmaking power - whether it is manifest as a geographical dislocation or as a sense of cultural or psychological alienation.

• English literature
• Marcel Proust
• semiotics
• British and Irish Literature

"This rich and wide-ranging book grows from a single idea of extraordinary analytic power - that literary work has its origin in a perception of separation from the feelings, places, and experiences that make up the identity of the author - a state to which, either figuratively or literally, the term 'exile' may be applied. Zeng shows how pervasive this perception is in literature, and how an awareness of this motif may serve to show the underlying connectedness of works across a huge spectrum of times and cultures." - Eric Henry, Senior Lecturer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Asian Studies Department

Hong Zeng is an assistant professor of Chinese language, literature, and film at Carleton College.

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