Borders separate but also connect self and other, and literary texts not only enact these bordering processes, but form part of such processes. This book gestures towards a borderless world, stepping, as it were, with thousand-mile boots from south to north (even across the Atlantic), from South Africa to Scandinavia. It also shows how literary texts model and remodel borders and bordering processes in rich and meaningful local contexts. The essays assembled here analyse the crossing and negotiation of borders and boundaries in works by Nadine Gordimer, Ingrid Winterbach, Deneys Reitz, Janet Suzman, Marlene van Niekerk, A.S. Byatt, Thomas Harris, Frank A. Jenssen, Eben Venter, Antjie Krog, and others under different signs or conceptual points of attraction. These signs include a spiritual turn, eventfulness, self-understanding, ethnic and linguistic mobilization, performative chronotopes, the grotesque, the carceral, the rhetorical, and the interstitial. Contributors: Ileana Dimitriu, Heilna du Plooy, John Gouws, Anne Heith, Lida Krüger, Susan Meyer, Adéle Nel, Ellen Rees, Johan Schimanski, Tony Ullyatt, Phil van Schalkwyk, Hein Viljoen.

This book represents a contribution to both border studies and short story studies. In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide: as material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. This collection of critical essays focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. At the same time, the concept of the border, as well as neighbouring notions of liminality and intersectionality, is used to illuminate the short story’s unique aesthetic potential. The first section, “Geopolitics and Grievable Lives”, includes chapters that address the various ways in which contemporary stories engage with our newly bordered world and borders within contemporary Britain. The second section examines how British short stories engage with “Ethnicity and Liminal Identities”, while the third, “Animal Encounters and Metamorphic Bodies”, focuses on stories concerned with epistemological borders and borderlands of existence and identity. Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the varied and complex ways in which British short stories in the twenty-first century engage with the concept of the border.

These inter-disciplinary essays explore the foundational ambiguity of borders, their roles, functions and place in the Anglophone world, whether it be in history, politics, literature, art or music or, theoretically, in the critical relations between space, discourse and representation.

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

In a ‘post-everything’ world, we have felt more pain than happiness in building and tampering with borders. The term ‘border’ has been expanded to become a ploy for grim, chauvinistic, self-flattery, and ultra-nationalist bigotry. We have also faced notorious coverage of the ‘border’ in the media worldwide, and its diverse forms have been extensively deployed in cinema and literature. Centering on a wide range of literary and cinematic genres, the contributors to this volume explore and explain distinct theoretical and scholarly arguments to promote research on literary, linguistic, and media representations of the word ‘border.’

The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture engages with migration to, within, and from Europe, foregrounding migration through the lenses of historical migratory movement and flows associated with colonialism and postcolonialism. With essays on literature, film, drama, graphic novels, and more, the book addresses migration and media, hostile environments, migration and language, migration and literary experiment, migration as palimpsest, and figurations of the migrant. Each section is introduced by one of the handbook’s contributing editors and interviews with writers and film directors are integrated throughout the volume. The essays collected in the volume move beyond the discourse of the “refugee crisis” to trace the historical roots of the current migration situation through colonialism and decolonization.