Bonds and Borders

Identity, Imagination and Transformation in Literature

Edited By: Rebecca DeWald, Dorette Sobolewski

£34.99

This collection of essays explores bonds and borders in literature, from colonial times to post-9/11 narratives. Trespassing boundaries to create new ideas, these essays dissect, subvert, and challenge our understandings of identity in an international society.

The essays in this collection exemplify the relevance of bonds and borders in literature and contribute each in their own individual ways to the discourse…

The essays in this collection exemplify the relevance of bonds and borders in literature and contribute each in their own individual ways to the discourse between literary studies and Border studies. The scope of contributions ranges from revisiting older works from colonial times to discovering current narratives in post-9/11 literature; from the search for a national identity in Welsh poetry to self-transformation and the trans-cultural journeys of individuals in the literature of migration; and from the cosmopolitanism of Black Britain to gendered readings of Arab-American war narratives. Although not conceived and/or constructed as a whole, this collection gains particularly through disunity: topics cross over where one would least expect them to; borders are trespassed in order to give rise to new ideas and points of study. These essays by young researchers from a variety of disciplines and geographical backgrounds effectively work as a unit to dissect, subvert, challenge, or perhaps validate pre-conceived understandings of identity in an international society. They present a polydialectic approach to Literature and the supposedly borderless society of the Western world and its profound impact on individual identity.

Dorette Sobolewski is a native of Diepholz, Germany. She is a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow, and her PhD research in American Studies is based on an interdisciplinary analysis of class in the novels of Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow. She lives with her husband in Charlottesville, Virginia, and divides her time between Germany, Scotland, and the US.

Rebecca DeWald is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. The focus of her studies lies on the interstices between translation and literary theory, which she addresses in her thesis on the relationship between original text and translation in Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka. She is co-general editor of eSharp, the University of Glasgow’s postgraduate online journal, and is currently preparing an exhibition on the Scottish poet, writer, and translator Alastair Reid.