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‘A Woman’s Lot Is to Suffer’: Regenerations of Immigrant Women in Modern Contemporary Literature Tiffany Messer-Bass Introduction The theme of being reborn as an outsider in another culture is one that is becoming more common in popular fiction surrounding themes of migration, especially where women are centered as protagonists. According to Agnes Woolley in Contemporary Asylum Narratives (2014), only recently has the world of humanities begun to explore migration as a study area. The migrating woman goes through many phases during her lifetime in which she must be reborn. This article will provide a comparative literary analysis of three novels: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (2017), Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017), and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013). With these titles in mind, this essay will first define key terms to do with migration and regeneration and provide brief summaries of each of the three texts. It will then explore the identities of the texts’ protagonists, their regenerations, and how these regenerations shaped their futures, both in the short and long term. The writer of this paper hopes that the reader will take away a better understanding of migration, why it occurs, and how it is represented in literature.
Regeneration and Migration In the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, ‘regenerate’ is defined in a medical or biological way and is quoted as ‘[a]n umbrella term, not defined under international law, reflecting the common lay understanding of a
