Representations and Images of Frontiers and Borders: On the Edge

Product Description This collection gathers a variety of scholars representing various methodological perspectives and applying diverse critical lenses to analyze the idea of borders, borderlands, frontiers, and liminal space, as they are represented in literature and philosophy. The idea of the border and frontier is perhaps more important than ever: under the siege of COVID-19, with shattered illusions of a post-racial world, when a global effort is required as a response to a crisis that does not respect national or regional borders, we need to reconsider what frontiers and borders mean to us, and how to best understand them so that they do not divide, but point to areas of common knowledge, collective experiences, and shared humanity. Drawing upon examples from different continents (Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe) and from diverse specific places (such as the Mexico-US border, or the contested Palestinian frontiers), and using a variety of critical perspectives (evoking Gloria Anzaldua, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edward Said, for instance), this volume explores the idea of frontiers and borders in order to comment on their representations in literature, philosophy, music, and cinema, and on the human condition in general. About the Author Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wrocław, Poland. She is the author of California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden (2019; 2020); and Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity, and the Maternal (2007). She is the co-editor of A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture (with Agata Zarzycka, 2017) and Interiors: Interiority/Exteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (with Sonia Front, 2010). Her research interests include critical post-humanities, anti-speciesism, and feminism. Alejandra María Aventín Fontana holds degrees in Hispanic Philology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, a Diploma in Hispanic Culture from the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, and a Master’s Degree in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language from Antonio de Nebrija University, Spain. She received her doctorate in Hispanic Literatures and Literary Genres in the Western Context from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Since 2010, she has been a Professor and Researcher at Carlos III University of Madrid. Her research focus is the impact of poetry on the representation of functional diversity, contemporary Hispanic poetry, feminism, gender studies, and ecocriticism.