In the article, Ismail Kadaré's 1986 novel, The Shadow, is analysed as a form of apologia pro vita sua about the deformations of life under a dictatorial regime. This interpretation demonstrates that Kadaré was a dissident in his own terms during the reign of the dictatorial regime and that this type of opposition was something different from the political and ideological critique of post-totalitarianism. Throughout his work, Kadaré has suggested the existence of an alternative Albania to that of the regime, intimating that the historical roots of his nation can give birth to different versions of Albanian identity to that propagated by the Albanian Party of Labour. Using the figure of the legendary Albanian hero, Konstantine, in The Shadow, The Twilight of the Steppe Gods, and elsewhere in his oeuvre, Kadaré links the contemporary problematics of dissidence and existential authenticity under the dictatorship to historical patterns of Albanian culture and individual existence.

The perception of the Weimar Republic as the high-point of ‘classical modernity’ in which all areas of society were permeated by a fatal sense of crisis has been revised as an explanatory model in recent historiography. Historians have returned to this period with a new sense of the openness of the crisis environment, particularly in areas of social and cultural history. Male homosexuality emerged as a central theme of Weimar social and cultural crisis as it became possible for homosexual men to imagine an identity and a ‘life’ for the first time. These men began to understand their lives as a continuum in terms of their sexuality and to express their lives in writing. The discourse of masculinist homosexuality, which emerged during the first decades of the 20th century, was used by some homosexuals as a means to self-identification and self-validation in the open environment of post-war early Weimar. However, this speculative framework of masculine comradeship and warrior ethos became less and less tenable as the internal contradictions as well as the socio-political pressures of the Republic increased. The paper explores the internal tensions between homosexuality and masculinist identity in two literary works from the Weimar Republic, Max René Hesse’s Partenau and Thomas Mann’s ‘Mario and the Magician’.

Literary transnationalism is a relatively new term critically mediating the relationships between national literatures and the wider forces of globalizing culture. ‘Literary’ or ‘critical’ ‘transnationalism’ describes aspects of literary circulation and movement that defy reduction to the level of the nation-state. The term originated in American Studies as a means of bringing American literary discourse into a new relationship with the world that it inhabits. Can the concept of ‘transnationalism’ help in broader discussions of world literature and literary globalization? Literary transnationalism in this sense would identify that point at which two or more geo-cultural imaginaries intersect, connect, engage with, disrupt or conflict with each other in literary form. In this article I discuss transnationalism in terms of its origins and intellectual history in order to suggest ways in which transnational theory might be developed as an analytical tool of both global breadth and historical depth with particular reference to European literature.

How do nations, communities and individuals seek to restore individual meaning, social justice and social trust in the wake of traumatic histories? While international legal models have underpinned the processes of lustration in ex-communist countries, other forms of coming to terms with the past have contributed to the rebuilding of social trust in these environments. Literature has taken a role both in preparing the ground for more formal politico-legal processes, and in problematizing single-answer, simplistic or categorical responses to the complex issues of guilt, responsibility, complicity, victimhood and suffering in these societies. The significant new role that European literature has taken since the Holocaust is to come to terms with the past as a record not merely as a history, but as a responsibility and thereby to participate in the processes of lustration and rebuilding of civil society that have formed contemporary Europe.

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