Migration literature in Austria and Great Britain – a comparative thematic approach

In this article, I define migration literature as literature on the topic of migration and I argue that it is a sub-genre that exists in both various bodies of literature as well as various languages. In order to proof my point, I illustrate it with examples from contemporary texts on experiences of migration in German and English and focus on recurrent themes and motifs in them. In particular, I look at texts by writers living and working in Great Britain and Austria, i.e. by Monica Ali, Anna Kim, Timothy Mo, Caryl Phillips, Hamid Sadr, and Vladimir Vertlib. These texts, despite their different contexts, often show great similarity in the motifs they deal with, such as: language and language learning, identity and the search for identity (expressed for instance by cooking, eating and food ), or depictions of the new homeland. In this paper, I scrutinise these motifs in a comparative manner.