The Strasbourg stop : the challenges of unity and diversity in theory and fiction

Abstract

‘Context is all’, as the phrase that becomes a refrain in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has it. Let us by all means ‘look at the context’, as our teachers of literature, at all levels, have always enjoined us to do: a tendency they share with politicians everywhere, who insist that ‘taking things in context’ will help us appreciate their decisions better. Teachers and politicians, context and interpretation, shared attributes and varying natures, vision and reality: these will all feature in this chapter’s consideration of the representation in specific works of theory and fiction of the ideality of Europe. Indeed, the context – almost absurdly – will be as broad as Europe and as deep as the Mediterranean, and the methodology approaches that generality through texts that both anticipate and allegorise the difficulties surrounding ‘unity in diversity’, that precept of European union which remains patchily synchronised with perceptions of the project.