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Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work (1976) has proven challenging since its publication because readers and critics have trouble classifying it. The challenge may be related to a common feature of Baldwin criticism, namely a tendency to compare late career works to early ones and to find them lacking: the experimental nature of later works of nonfiction like No Name in the Street (1972), The Devil Finds Work, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) does not square easily with the more conventional essays that made Baldwin famous in his early years. I attempt to reframe The Devil Finds Work not through a comparison to other Baldwin essays, but rather through a comparison to his fiction, specifically the novel Giovanni’s Room. I posit that a greater appreciation for Devil can result from thinking of it as a story, specifically the story of a failed love affair.
The author travels to St.-Paul-de-Vence, the site of Baldwin’s final decades, with the intention of understanding expatriation and/or exile more deeply. The intention of this visit is to fill in some of the gaps in Baldwin’s official biographies, which do not tend to dwell on his time spent in Provence as much as his time in Paris, Turkey, New York, and elsewhere. By interviewing a woman who knew Baldwin well during those years, the author manages to add new layers to his understanding of Baldwin’s late years, but finally arrives at the understanding that writing (rather than analyzing) is the main goal of the expatriate writer. Inspired by Baldwin’s muse, he stops contemplating his subject and gets to work, finally connecting the act of writing to expatriation by doing it.
in his (mildly) successful Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri (London: John Murray) which went through at least five editions 1835 and 1845. The first complete translation of the libello came in 1846 from the pen of the expatriate Anglo-Indian Joseph Garrow with the title of The Early Life of Dante Alighieri (Florence: Le Monnier). The 1860s saw the transatlantic publication of three ground-breaking translations by the American scholar
London, supplementing the import of titles, such as Pompeo Venturi’s (Lucca, 1732) and Antonio Zatta’s (Venezia, 1757–58, one of the ‘most “desirable”’ exemplars for British collectors) editions ( Havely , 2014: 120). In 1808–9 alone, there were two new releases. The first work was authored by Romualdo Zotti, an expatriate printer and teacher of Italian in a girls’ school, and consisted of a three-volume annotated edition of the Commedia
were instrumental in establishing links with the city’s libraries and institutes of higher education’ (Valgimigli, 1932: 30). For many, the ‘chief cause of the success of the Dante Society’ ( Tablet , 1910: 24) was the Italian expatriate Azeglio Valgimigli. Arrived from Pisa in 1881, in 1882 Valgimigli began his career by teaching the only Italian class existing at the time at the Athenaeum Club: his classes were so
microcosm. They have dramatised her negotiated bid for selfhood and status within what might be called the national house, that is, within the inherited and correlated structures of both family and nation-state. This chapter will address how three very different postcolonial women writers, each one a ‘daughter’, if lost or prodigal, to one or other nation, have written themselves into the national family script, or redrafted the daughter’s relationship to the national father. The novels in question are: the expatriate Australian Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children
Our story starts not in the southern colonies but with a canonical scene of literary expatriation and scandalous celebrity: Lord Byron in Genoa, spending the spring of 1823 with the so-called ‘Blessington circus’, a tight little entourage of idler-adventurers who cast their web across Ireland, England, and continental Europe. The ‘circus’ was named for the Irish author and literary hostess Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, and her second husband, Charles John Gardiner, the Earl of Blessington. It also included Blessington’s daughter, Lady Harriet
, post-Holocaust literature.51 The bilingual collection W. G. Sebald: Schreiben ex patria/Expatriate Writing (Fischer ed. 2009), explores the premise of Sebald as writer of Heimat literature even as it extends the investigation of his work within the context of ‘cultural memory’52 and of the author as ideological construct. ‘On the one hand’, according to Gerhard Fischer’s Introduction: 256 4003 Baxter-A literature:Layout 1 9/9/13 13:03 Page 257 The question of genre in W. G. Sebald’s ‘prose’ Sebald is not unlike the post-modern, uprooted expatriate in the age of
2 Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease At the time that Things Fall Apart appeared in 1958, Achebe was already a major figure in the Nigerian media. The organisation he worked for, the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, was a highly political one, focused on promoting a particular model of independence – the One-Nigeria model – that favoured the interests of its British expatriate management. Rapidly elevated to a senior executive position, Achebe’s assigned role was to produce programming that would represent Nigeria in an attractive and harmonious way to
various forms of expatriation ‘chosen’ by modernist writers – than his imagined repatriation of Lawrence: the manner in which Lawrence comes to stand for an indigenous working-class culture which is opposed to the kinds of romantic and post-romantic cultures for which aimless wandering (facilitated, though Williams does not say this, by colonial networks and infrastructures) was both a privilege and a rite of passage.9 Lawrence experiences a similar fate in novels from the 1950s and 1960s, which name him as a predecessor, both to establish their own cultural authority