Ilija Trojanow

Ilija Trojanow established his name as an international writer with the novel Der Weltensammler or The Collector of Worlds (2006). This volume contains an interview with Trojanow, a previously unpublished essay on Lessing's Nathan the Wise, and essays by European and North American scholars on central aspects of Trojanow's growing oeuvre.

Ilija Trojanow, born in Bulgaria in 1965 and brought up in East Africa, established his name as an international writer with the novel Der Weltensammler or The Collector of Worlds (2006), about the cross-cultural Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Since the mid-1990s Trojanow has been prolific in a number of genres, including travel, ethnography and science fiction. He has also become a major public intellectual in Austria and Germany with provocative interventions on topics such as Islam and the West, civil rights in the age of cybersurveillance and climate change. His imaginative writing sits at the centre of a number of defining contemporary concerns, in particular the relationship between identity, language and culture. This volume contains an interview with Trojanow, a previously unpublished essay by him on Lessing's Enlightenment parable of inter-religious tolerance, Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), and essays by European and North American scholars on central aspects of his growing uvre. The contributors explore why Trojanow is one of today's leading writers of German while challenging a number of myths that have grown up around him and his magnum opus, Der Weltensammler.

Autorentext

Julian Preece is Professor of German Studies at Swansea University and Director of its Centre for Contemporary German Culture. He is the author of Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands (1999; with Waldemar Lotnik), The Life and Work of Günter Grass: Literature, History, Politics (2001), Out of the Shadows of a Husband: The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti (2007) and Baader-Meinhof and the Novel: Narratives of the Nation/Fantasies of the Revolution, 1970-2010 (2012).

Zusammenfassung
«In erster Linie werden Spezialisten und Studenten das Werk als Quelle und Anstoß für ihre wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen nutzen, aber auch ein begeisterter Leser, der Hintergründe verstehen und in die Tiefe gehen will, fühlt sich bestens bedient.» (Frank Riedel, literaturkritik.de 02/2014)

«This is a very good volume, which will be of great use to scholars and students alike. It is tightly edited, well conceived, and does a great service in making this important writer better known to readers and academics in the anglophone world.» (Stuart Taberner, Modern Language Review 109.4, 2014)

«Dies ist die erste Sammlung von Einzelbeiträgen zum bisherigen Werk von Ilija Trojanow, die eine neue Ära der literaturwissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung mit dessen Werk einläutet.»
(Sabine Wilke, Gegenwartsliteratur 16/2016) «[...] this volume is a valuable and important resource for future research on Trojanow and opens possible new approaches to this by now well-known and often provocative writer and intellectual.»
(Sandra Vlasta, Austrian Studies, Volume 24/2016)

Inhalt

Contents: Julian Preece: Preface - Ilija Trojanow/Julian Preece: Interview - Ilija Trojanow: Weltbürgertum heute: Rede zu einer kosmopolitischen Kultur/What Being a Citizen of the World Means Today: On Cosmopolitan Culture (translated by Seiriol Dafydd) - Cornelius Partsch: Autopol, Prison Privatisation and the Dystopian Turn in Contemporary Sci-Fi - Caitríona Ní Dhúill: The Hero as Language Learner: Biography and Metabiography in Der Weltensammler/The Collector of Worlds - Ernest Schonfield: On the Road to Mecca with Trojanow and Burton - Eva M. Knopp: Letting the Subaltern Laugh: How Humour Works in Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall/The World Is Large and Salvation Lurks Around Every Corner and Der Weltensammler/The Collector of Worlds - Julian Preece: Mr Iceberger Runs Amok: The Aporias of Commitment in EisTau/Melting Ice - Christina Kraenzle: Rewriting Colonial Travelogues: Cosmopolitan Visions and Colonial Legacies in Nomade auf vier Kontinenten/Nomad on Four Continents - Ben Morgan: Two Models of Spiritual Life and Narrative Sovereignty: Trojanow and Religion - Julian Preece: From Kisch to Kapuscinski: Trojanow and the European Tradition of Reportage.