Between Horror and Hope

This book addresses one of the most urgent issues of our current time: forced migration and its spatial realities. While public and media discourses frequently focus on refugee camps, literary research has so far neglected their crucial role. Responding to this gap, this book looks at how the refugee camp as a space is represented, characterised and discursively negotiated in contemporary literary writing.
Through the analysis of selected literary texts set in refugee camps, this book explores how narrative constructions of camp life shape our understanding of the refugee camp as a space of displacement. To approach the literary representation of refugee camps, it discusses the most influential critical concepts and paradigms surrounding the camp space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of social space, it conceptualises the refugee camp as both a space where people live their day-to-day lives and as a structural entity embedded in modern-day global politics.