Sojourners’ Experience of Returning Home: A Short Story Collection and a Literary Analysis of Six Narratives Depicting the Disorientation and Reorientation of (Re)Adaptation

Pálsdóttir, Karítas Hrundar (2023) Sojourners’ Experience of Returning Home: A Short Story Collection and a Literary Analysis of Six Narratives Depicting the Disorientation and Reorientation of (Re)Adaptation. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

As migration increases globally, the study of adaptation to a foreign country continues to receive much academic attention. Meanwhile, the contrasting study of readaptation to one’s homeland is largely neglected, despite researchers suggesting it to be an even harder process. My Creative-Critical Writing Ph.D. makes a case for readaptation literature, a new literary genre within transnational migrant fiction, that looks at sojourners—a privileged group of migrants who travel freely and by choice—and their experience of returning home. Through the composition of a short story collection, I explore the issues of belonging and exile and cast a light on the phenomenon of readaptation as a transnational human experience. Characters’ state of in-betweenness is demonstrated through formal inventiveness to do with structure, affecting plot and exposition, and translingual elements, including the use of words and sentences from languages other than English to flavour the prose. In my critical essay, I examine academic literature on the topic of readaptation and analyse creative literature—six narratives—featuring tales of readaptation. My reading reveals two new metaphors that help ground the meaning of disorientation and reorientation in the context of readaptation. I cast a light on depictions of grief, particularly those of shattered dreams and heartbreak and challenge the concept of ambiguous loss. Furthermore, I look at portrayals of ‘successful’ readaptation, identity shifts, and coping styles and suggest that the existing readaptation framework requires expansion to be able to deal with the complexity of the phenomenon. Through contextualization, the narratives open up the psychological concepts, while the psychology deepens the reading of the narrative form and its exposition of liminality and in-betweenness.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	05 Nov 2024 09:07
Last Modified:	05 Nov 2024 09:07
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97493
DOI:

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