There are apparent oppositions between the conditions of exile and the predilections of national culture: margins vs. center, absence vs. presence, anarchy vs. hierarchy, open vs. closed form, difference vs. sameness. Becoming more sensitive to the forced homogeneity in national culture, émigré authors encounter new forms of identity that are less bound up with the framework of a particular geographical place, ethnicity or language. Either arguing for an alternative cultural nationalism, either criticizing the concept of national culture altogether as a restriction of identity, exile provides a critical distance, while in turn this very distance renders (re)integration into national narratives more difficult, even when authors are not being banned or neglected anymore.

My paper presents four interconnected case-studies (Sándor Márai, Agota Kristof, Imre Kertész, Tibor Fischer) to reveal how the characteristics of literary exile run counter to the national-philological concepts of literature, what sorts of discrepancies appear in terms of language, canon, and politics, and how exile, in one way or the other, calls attention to culture being local and diasporaic at the same time.