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The 130th anniversary of Stefan Zweig’s birthday in 2011 triggered the latest “rediscovery” of the Austrian writer in Europe and North America, manifesting itself in various new editions and translations, exhibitions, graphic novels, radio plays, and movies inspired by his life and work, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Maria Schrader’s Vor der Morgenröte. At the same heated debates about the writer’s literary merit flared up again. This introduction provides an overview of the international reception history of Zweig, whose works have been translated into more than sixty languages since the 1920s, while causing relentless aversion and controversy among scholars and critics. This chapter also explains why the Chinese reception with its wealth of unexplored material spanning almost the whole twentieth century serves as the ideal case study not only to re-read Zweig’s work but also to rethink our understanding of cross-cultural literary connections as complex “global systems of cultural transfer.”

This chapter reconstructs the discourse of national crisis generated around mass departure in post-war Ireland and explores how it shaped the production of emigrant subjectivities. Based on a close reading of five oral narratives of leaving, contextualised through discursive analysis of local and national newspaper reportage, parliamentary debates, and contemporary novels and travel literature, the chapter examines how subjects interact with a set of popular constructions of the emigrant as they attempt to narrate the particular circumstances and considerations that conditioned their own experiences of leaving for England. As well as showing how understandings of migrant agency were mediated through this ‘politics of exit’, the chapter underscores the emotional dynamics of family life as a key context shaping the personal meanings of departure, providing insight into the complex role played by leaving stories as sites of psychic conflict and integration within migrants’ overall migration narratives. Triggered by the act of recalling their decision to leave, these emotional processes point to the difficulties of leaving in the past, but also to the present self’s ongoing imaginative dialogue with the people and places left behind, and to how this conditions the reconstruction of past experience.

The chapter begins by justifying the use of the term hegemony, but also points out the relevance of the term cultural transfer as allowing agency to peoples beyond the imperial core. It looks at imperial rule and the behaviour of the cross-Channel elite, examining both phenomena in terms of cultural values. It relates these both to vulnerability and—ultimately—to the enduring strength of cross-Channel links and of values that predisposed the elite to work for the continuation of empire through periods of disputed succession and civil war up to and beyond 1154. It uses case studies to analyse political behaviour beyond the imperial core in northern France, Wales, and Scotland, demonstrating how the hard and soft power of empire was both seductive and repellent, but that it involved attractions that made for a degree of integration. The theme of underlying plurality runs through the chapter.

Nuances the male-dominated history of collecting and display at the Stuart court, and the use of the “Italianate” as the benchmark of cultural erudition. Confirms that Anna’s palaces were largely filled with Flemish and Dutch artworks and argues that, far from being a sign of her disinterest or naïveté, these goods were a tool for building affinity with her Danish ancestors and siblings while highlighting the continued currency of artistic centres outside of Italy. It further shows the queen facilitating cultural transfer between the Stuart and Oldenburg courts as numerous parallels link Anna’ tastes, interests, and patronage, with those of her brother, King Christian IV of Denmark (1577-1648), which are particularly noticeable in the realms of painting and music.