Islam and Contemporary European Literature

Examines the use of Islamic referents and themes in literary writings by European authors.

This book uses literary texts featuring themes and references related to Islam and the Muslim world to offer new perspectives on non-Western intellectual history and contemporary European literature. Shifting from abstraction to sublimation by highlighting individualized interpretations of religion by authors from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds, it asks how and why present-day European authors, from Albania, France, Germany, Spain and the former Yugoslavia, write fiction or fictionalized works that engage with Islamic religious themes and Europe’s Islamic past. This thematic focus contributes to the interrogation of Eurocentric understandings of literary canons and points out ways of decolonizing the curriculum in the humanities by reading contemporary European literature through the lens of cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and in-betweenness.