The book offers ten essays which explore the interaction between literature and politics. The authors investigate a variety of genres including young-adult fiction, national poetry, novels, autobiography, and performance art from different time periods ranging from the 18 up to the 21 century from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Grouped in three sections, the essays focus on the relationship between fiction and identity; the creation of spaces of/in fiction; and the interplay of irony and fiction. They reveal that fiction has a fundamental potential not only to react to but also to affect and shape the world. This offers a possibility to negotiate and re-imagine the ways in which we perceive the world and position ourselves within it.

Contents: Derritt Mason: Vulnerable Fictions: Queer Youth, Storytelling, and Narratives of Victimization - Anita Vrzina: Authentically Black: Recognition, Authorship, and Fictions of Black Authenticity - Nabil N. Barham: Poets of the Unseen: Musing Through Loss and Displacement in Identity Formation in and Around the Palestine/Israel Conflict - Juliane Fiedler: Nation-Building in Nineteenth Century German Literature: The Example of Wilhelm Raabe - Maha El Hissy: Negotiating Colonial Legacies in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North - Bela Gligorova: An Auto-Performative Humor-filled Journey with Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia (1987): Listening to Spalding Gray 'Gesture' his Way through the Cinematic Reality of Intersecting 'Contact Zones' - Kathleen Keirn: Hybrid Cosmopolitanisms, Heterotopias and The Female American - Louisa Söllner: Restaging the Colonial Encounter: Exhibition Culture and Practices of Fictionalization - Andrew Allen: Irony and Sincerity in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Reinhard Möller: Irony under Control? Kierkegaard's Conception of Controlled Irony as a Critical Theory of Aesthetic Fictionalization.