Reading(s) / across / Borders: Studies in Anglophone Borders Criticism(33 Spatial Practices)

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the relevance of borders and bordering as a spatial paradigm in Anglophone studies. It sets out to provide a critical counter-narrative to the 1990s globalization argument of a “borderless” world by insisting on the significant roles borders play. The essays range in subject matter from geography, history, British and American literature to painting and Reggae music and map out different conceptualisations of the border: place, line, process, contact zones, etc. The volume’s cross-border “narrative” serves as a point of communication between the local and the global, between Europe and America, between different literary and artistic genres, thus challenging the divides of geography and literature, between “real” territorial borders and their “fictional” counterparts.

Table of Contents:
 Acknowledgments  Notes on Contributors  Introduction: Where to Draw the Line?   Ciaran Ross  Prologue: Borders and the Moment of Bewilderment   Cornelius Crowley Part 1: Lines of Demarcations: Geopolitical Borders and Boundaries  Introduction to Part 1 1 Union, Home Rule and Partition: Irish Borders Mapped and Remapped   Pauline Collombier-Lakeman 2 Delimiting a Utopian Space: The Borders of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in the 19th Century   Marine Bellégo 3 The Historiography of the American West: Frontier(s), Borders, Borderlands   Nathalie Massip 4 The Inner Border: Edward Hopper’s Reimagining the Frontier   Hélène Gaillard 5 Combining a Closed and Open Border in the Terrorism Era: The Example of the Canada/US Border   Pierre-Alexandre Beylier Part 2: Aesthetic Borders and Liminal Space  Introduction to Part 2 6 Borders and Liminal Spaces in 16th-Century Collected Poetry: A Spatial Approach to the Advent of the English Sonnet Sequence in Print   Rémi Vuillemin 7 Plotting a Line: Liminality and Border as Concept and Device in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy(1817)   Matthew Smith 8 The Insular Border as a Fluid Space of Transgression: Treasure Island’s Adventurous Aesthetics   Julie Gay Part 3: Crossing Borders: Considerations of the Other Side  Introduction to Part 3 9 Distant Tongues: The Border Poetics of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha   Amanda Murphy 10 Ex-centrism and Intersections: Crossing the Border in Continental Drift by Russell Banks   Marine Paquereau 11 Reggae Outernational: Borders and Trans/National Identity in Jamaican Popular Music   David Bousquet 12 Navigating the Restless “Boundaries of Migration”: Ruth Padel’s The Mara Crossingas a “Matter-Realist” Exploration of the Border between the Human and the Nonhuman   Maria Tang  Index of Names

About the Author :
Ciaran Ross is Professor of English and Irish Literature at the University of Strasbourg. He has published monographs on Samuel Beckett, including Beckett’s Art of Absence: Rethinking the Void (2011). He is the editor of SubVersions. Trans-National Readings of Modern Irish Literature (2010).