La Méditerranée littéraire, l’espace épique d’une quête de liberté ?

For thousands of years, the Mediterranean area has been a space of roaming and migration. Furthermore, migrants have always been confronted with borders and otherness. Their arduous journey fuelled the imagination of both ancient and contemporary authors. The Ancients’ works include epics of foundation and odysseys telling the return of heroes like Ulysses. They bring out several common and recurrent elements which form the basis of the heroic figure of the ancient migrant. They also convert the Mediterranean basin into an epic space. The contemporary literature inherits this imagination. Well-known writers, like Tunisian Fawzi Mellah and Frenchman Laurent Gaudé, reinvent the migrant’s quest for freedom. They enhance its tragic scope and add a new complexity to this timeless figure and its universe of physical and psychological Mediterranean wandering. In their critical novels of the elusive dreams, improvement and relief are never guaranteed.