Rethinking Identities Across Boundaries

This collection of essays aims to widen the current critique on borders by examining their entanglements with constructions of identity and disciplinary categories. In particular, it calls into question established models of gender, notions of narrative genres and typological genera of borders in today’s literary, artistic, philosophical, and socio-political discourse. The chapters interrogate boundaries and boundary-crossing not only in terms of geographical frontiers and the physical acts of trespassing, but also as discursive constructs that police crossing subjects as gendered subjects, on the one hand, and identify artistic genres and academic disciplines as fixed, sealed-in ways of understanding the world, on the other. Taking inspiration from the multiple meanings of the Italian word genere (which stands for “gender”, “genre”, and “typology”/“genus” simultaneously), the volume reflects on the gendered, narrative, and typological nature of borders and border imagery, and on the significance and potentialities of crossover phenomena taking place in borderlands, in the fields of arts, literature, anthropology, sociology and philosophy.

Claudia Capancioni is Reader in English Literature at Bishop Grosseteste University, UK. She specialises in Victorian and contemporary women writers, life and travel writing, and gender studies.Mariaconcetta Costantini is Full Professor of English Literature at G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. She specialises in Victorian and contemporary literature, especially in popular fiction, women writers, and the Gothic.Mara Mattoscio teaches English Literature and Culture at the University of Macerata, Italy. She specialises in Anglophone postcolonial literature and film, race and gender studies, and critical theory.