Boundaries

Boundaries is a collection of work offering creative and critical responses to methods of making, breaking, and negotiating boundaries. The concern of this book is not simply to address the theme of boundaries; we also hope to breach the boundaries surrounding the usual ways that such a theme would ordinarily be debated. As such, this collection includes papers from both arts and science disciplines including literary, theatrical, historical, linguistic, educational, travel writing and geographical perspectives, from academics, postgraduate research students, postgraduate creative writers, and creative writers without institutional affiliation. The book is interdisciplinary in its approach, and boundary-crossing in its presentation: instead of organising the collection in sections of papers according to whether they are predominantly creative or critical in approach, the papers are presented together, and are organised in three sections according to the way that those papers approach the boundary that they perceive: whether that boundary is being made, negotiated, or broken. In addition to the main papers in the three sections, the collection is framed by interviews with the plenary speakers who were invited to the conference, Adam Roberts and Hanan Al-Shaykh. These are writers whose works repeatedly deal with boundaries of form, genre, and audience, and the interviews included here start to explore the range of boundaries existing in their work and in their lives as writers. The format of their contribution to this book allows another boundary to be crossed, by including formal, structured interviews as another medium of developing the debate. Taking the principle that the idea of the boundary is, in fact and in imagination, boundless, Jenni Ramone and Gemma Twitchen gather together in Boundaries sixteen texts that stage in adventurous and provocative ways the endless reconceptualisation of this most enigmatic of concepts. Boundaries is at once a startling reassessment and necessary reorientation around its subject, in which critical acuity and creative panache cross and recross the borders of imaginative space. To say that this is a boundary-breaking collection, that frontiers have been transgressed, limits erased and hitherto invisible liminal territories mapped, is only to draw a line underneath the limitless inventiveness of the transgressive and translative interventions of this volume. The reader of Boundaries will find herself bound in a nutshell that makes her a ruler of infinite space. Ramone and Twitchen are to be applauded for redrawing the map and erasing the borders between the critical, the creative and the cultural, with such passion and precision. Julian Wolfreys, author of Writing London: Inventions of the City Make, break, negotiate - or, if you will, here are three impossible things to do with conceptual boundaries and all before breakfast, or at least middle-age; so say the exciting collective of young scholars, critics and writers who come together here. The result is much brilliant making, breaking and negotiating of all sorts of boundaries - but above all the boundary between the critical and the creative. Nothing could be more timely, or important. John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Lancaster