Modern literary exile: the ones who stay and the ones who leave

Before the nineteenth century, exile denoted forceful banishment from one's home city or country. In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire redefined the meaning of exile by including internal exile as a manifestation of the condition. This displacement excludes a physical uprooting and is strictly internal. In addition to this acquired layer of meaning, the question of exile is complicated further by the modern author's assumed distance from the rest of the community. In order to explore the symptoms and consequences of physical, geographical exile, this thesis offers a comparison between Fernando Pessoa and Orhan Pamuk, two authors who are physically and creatively rooted in their native cities, and Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, and Andr Aciman, three exiled authors whose work is fueled by their exilic condition.