Homo Europaeus som författare : Litterära undersökningar av den svensk-europeiska författarens syn på europeisk identitet och gemenskap

Sammanfattning: This thesis analyses four European writers, whose common denominator is that they have moved to Sweden from other European countries and chosen to write in Swedish: Caterina Pascual Söderbaum, Theodor Kallifatides, Gabriela Melinescu and Sigrid Combüchen. Focus lies on novels published by the authors in the 21st century. The thesis builds upon theories on memory by Pierre Nora and on imagined communities by Benedict Anderson, Chiara Bottici and Benoît Challand. In Imagined Communities, Anderson shows the effects of the emerging nation states on the modern novel in the 19th century. The hypothesis of this study is that the emergence of the European Union and the resulting European movement will affect narratives in a similar way, but on a European rather than national level. The main finding seems to confirm this, showing that an imagined European community takes shape in the studied novels, surpassing that of the nation state’s borders.  All writers focus on memories, but in two different ways: Kallifatides and Melinescu depict long memories, starting in ancient times and with a positive view on remembrance as a focus on what is in common for Europeans. Pascual Söderbaum and Combüchen, on the other hand, depict memories from the dark 20th century and the importance of forgetting and moving on in order to give future generations freedom. In most novels, however, there are examples of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory), with Nora’s terminology, expanding towards a common European identity, in spite of the plethora of myths and languages.