This review examines William Stroebel’s Literature’s Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape (2025), and discusses by which the work traces the physical materiality of displaced refugee and diasporic narratives across the Greek- and Turkish-speaking linguistic and geographic borders of the Mediterranean. In Literature’s Refuge, Stroebel draws upon David Damrosch’s “scriptworld” concept to critically question how the labor of multiple “textual handlers,” such as editors and readers, shapes the circulation and literary belonging of texts written in Greek, Ottoman, and Latin scripts across time and space. Throughout five relational chapters, Stroebel featly adopts a cross-temporal approach that brings marginalized and acclaimed voices, from Şānī, Cavafy, and Doukas to Adıvar, Agathangelos, and Yaşın, on equal footing. The review highlights Stroebel’s deft close readings and extensive archival work, which bridge canonical and forgotten texts as well as past and present contexts. However, it also notes that the book’s material focus tends to privilege Greek-oriented sources, at times limiting its engagement with Turkish Mediterranean literary and cultural canons. In this respect, the review calls for a greater emphasis on textual circulation as a productive and relational force could further expand the comparative horizon the book opens.
