Introduction

Abstract

?he legacy of exile is not confined to the tradition of texts that chronicle the experience of expulsion or longing for a lost homeland. Its traces can be found even in narratives of return. By its very existence, the narrative project of return acknowledges the writing of exile that preceded it. It reorganizes the poetics of exile in various ways, reshaping and refracting an inherited set of figures to rhetorically construct and enact the experience of return and the place called home. As part of the project of reconfiguring exilic narrative constructions from a position more of familiarity than of difference, the writing of return offers a complex of figures of estrangement and connection and rhetorically marks a movement from the former to the latter.