This thesis examines how novels and films by British writers and filmmakers of Muslim heritage address the reshaping of masculinity through migration and interaction with other cultures within the UK. Drawing on a comparative critical framework that combines approaches from feminist, gender and masculinity studies, postcolonial, migration and transcultural studies, Islamic studies and literary and film theory, this thesis engages with five novels and four films that were written or released between 1985 and 2012, by British writers and filmmakers who were either born in a Muslim-majority nation or born to parents originating from a Muslim-majority country and who use their fictions to explore the presence and practices of Muslim cultures and communities in contemporary Britain. Through close analysis of work by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Sally El Hosaini, Ayub Khan-Din, Hanif Kureishi and Robin Yassin-Kassab, this thesis scrutinises how migrant and subsequent generations of postmigrant male protagonists construct their masculinity and how their conceptions of gender identity and performance are ‘translated’ into a British context amidst this century’s climate of Islamophobia and anti-migrant rhetoric, following events such as the Rushdie Affair, 9/11 and 7/7. In doing so, this thesis contends that through transnational movement and settlement conceptions of ‘Muslimness’, ‘Britishness’, and those of masculinity, are thrown into sharp relief and exposed as unstable and contingent constructs. By foregrounding the transcultural aesthetics and themes of this literary and cinematic corpus, however, I argue that this body of cultural production interrogates similarities and differences between the cultures they are positioned across. I use this transcultural approach to focus on how these texts depict father and son relations, religion, urban marginality and sexuality, and how through these foci, these novels creatively imagine new forms of masculinity that are forged through cultural contact, conflict and entanglement.

Yoko Tawada, écrivaine contemporaine d’expression japonaise et allemande, mène depuis trente ans une carrière qui connaît un succès critique considérable dans ses deux langues et pays d’écriture. Œuvre hybride à la croisée des genres, des langues, des cultures et des littératures, définie par une démarche autoréflexive et métalinguistique, c’est un sujet de choix pour la littérature comparée, avec laquelle elle partage des affinités fondamentales. Pourtant, elle n’est encore que peu étudiée par les comparatistes ; cette thèse se donne donc pour objet de combler en partie cette lacune. Au long d’un parcours à travers les champs de recherche et plusieurs problématiques de la littérature comparée, nous éclairons réciproquement le fonctionnement de l’écriture tawadienne et les enjeux comparatistes contemporains dans le but de démontrer l’intérêt d’un véritable dialogue entre la démarche critique et son objet. La première étape consiste à établir la pertinence et la nécessité d’une approche comparatiste. Ensuite, mimant le geste autoréflexif de l’écrivaine, nous analysons les rapports de la critique à l’œuvre littéraire afin de déterminer leurs apports mutuels. Puis nous étudions le traitement littéraire et épistémologique de la notion d’espace, et plus précisément celle de passage, centrales dans la poétique tawadienne comme dans la pratique comparatiste, avant de nous pencher sur l’Europe, espace géographique et culturel au cœur de la création chez Tawada et de la définition de la littérature comparée. Enfin, nous achevons ce parcours sur une réflexion dans les termes de Tawada sur la traduction littéraire et la littérature en traduction, nœud gordien du comparatisme. / Contemporary bilingual writer Yoko Tawada has received much critical acclaim for both her German and her Japanese literary work since 30 years now. Her hybrid writing between genres, languages, cultures and literatures, defined by a characteristic self reflexive and metalinguistic stance, is an ideal research topic for Comparative Literature. However, it has yet to be thoroughly studied by comparatists. In our thesis, we endeavour to fill part of this gap by connecting Tawada’s writing to comparative research fields and issues, in order for them to shed light on each other. Thus we aim to demonstrate what we can gain from a real dialogue between the researcher and its object of study. The first step will be to assess the meaningfulness and use of a comparative approach in the case of Tawada’s literature. Then, we will mimic the writer’s own self reflexive gesture in order to analyse the relationship between literary work and criticism and determine how they might benefit each other. Afterwards, we will study closely the epistemological and literary uses of space and passage, two crucial notions both for Comparatism and Tawada’s writing, before focusing on a more specific geographical and cultural space: that of Europe, which is also central to the writer’s literary journey as well as the very definition of Comparative Literature. Lastly, we will close with a study of Tawada’s thought-provoking take on the Gordian knot of Comparative Literature: literary translation and literature in translation.

Alors qu’un nombre croissant d’écrivains allochtones d’expression allemande avance de la périphérie au centre du champ littéraire allemand, les auteurs d’origine chinoise restent assez méconnus. En les présentant ici, nous souhaitons combler une lacune, notre propos se concentrant par ailleurs sur les œuvres de trois auteures : Luo Lingyuan (1963-), Xu Pei (1966-) et Lin Jun (1973-). Ces dernières ne publient que de la fiction : des nouvelles, des romans et de la poésie. Afin de clarifier les conditions dans lesquelles elles ont fait leur entrée sur la scène littéraire allemande, nous replaçons la littérature « chinoise » d’expression allemande dans son contexte d’émergence. Le rappel de l’historique des relations germano-chinoises depuis la période coloniale jusqu’à aujourd’hui précède ainsi un retour sur l’histoire de la littérature d’expression allemande depuis les années 1970. Mobilisant le concept d’« existence diasporique », qui explicite le mouvement permanent que les auteures opèrent entre les cultures et les langues chinoise et allemande, l’objectif de cette étude est de proposer une première analyse littéraire interne de leurs textes, dont le caractère transculturel est illustré à travers trois enjeux : temporel, spatial et identitaire. Par le détour de la confrontation directe et croisée avec les œuvres, qui problématisent le caractère transnational, transculturel et plurilingue des sujets en diaspora, nous interrogeons finalement la conception monoculturelle et monolingue de l’identité d’une part et de la littérature dite « allemande » d’autre part, dont nous montrons qu’elle se nourrit d’influences culturelles diverses et dépasse l’horizon national. / While an increasing number of foreign-born writers using German are leaving the fringes of the German literary scene and gaining prominence, authors of Chinese origin are still relatively unknown. We endeavour to fill this gap with a focus on the works of three of them: Luo Lingyuan (1963-), Xu Pei (1966-) and Lin Jun (1973-). Their publications are exclusively fictional: short-stories, novels and poetry. In order to highlight the conditions in which they entered the German literary scene, we place the literature written by Chinese in German in its context of emergence. We first present the history of Sino-German relations from the colonial period until today. Then, we describe the evolution of the literature written in German language since the 1970s. Using the concept of “diasporic existence”, which describes the authors’ constant back and forth movement between the Chinese and German cultures and languages, the aim of this study is to offer an initial internal literary analysis of the texts. Our ambition is to show their transcultural character in the light of three notions: time, space and identity. Through a direct and cross-cutting confrontation with these literary works that problematise the transnational, transcultural and multilingual quality of diasporic subjects, we finally question the monocultural and monolingual conception of identity on the one hand, and of the so-called “German” literature on the other, by pointing to the fact that the latter is impacted by diverse cultural influences and therefore exceeds the limits of the national horizon.

The aim of this thesis is to map and analyse literature written by authors with a Hungarian-language background who moved to Sweden between 1945 and 2015, and who have published literary works in book format. From the perspective of the sociology of literature, this thesis focuses on publishing channels and possibilities, the authors’ and their works places in the literary value system and feed-back in the form of reviews, but also choice of language, theme, and genre. The approach of the research for this thesis is new in Hungarian and Swedish literary studies, as the literary works are analysed irrespective of the language in which they are written. The research corpus consists of both Hungarian and Swedish literary works and one book in English. The second chapter presents the research that Hungarian researchers have conducted on Hungarian migration literature and offers an overview of the questions and results arising from this research. The authors with a Hungarian-language background in Sweden were divided into four groups, based on the time of their migration to Sweden. Four chapters, which comprise the analytic part of the thesis, present and analyse the author groups and their literary activities regarding language, purpose of any code-switching, chosen theme, and genre. The first group consists of authors who migrated to Sweden during the decade after the Second World War (1945–1955). The second group came between 1956 and 1958 in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The third group consists of Hungarians who moved to Sweden during the communist era, between 1959 and 1989. Finally, the fourth group came after the fall of communism (1990–2015). As many as half of the authors chose either Hungarian or Swedish as their language and there are surprisingly few authors working in both languages. The publishing channels depend on the literary works language and theme, and only half of the books have been published at established publishers. The literary works of these authors are categorized as Swedish-Hungarian migration literature. Literary history works until now have neglected these type of literatures, but it is imperative that the study of literature finds a way to acknowledge, include, position, and group them.