North and South: Essays on Gender, Race and Region

North and South is a multi-dimensional look at a prevailing theme in current discourse on the concept of borders. The collection of essays invites us to cross historical, regional, and disciplinary boundaries. Essays consider a range of primary texts, use a number of critical approaches, and inspire creative thinking and ideas. The question of North and South and of the borders they represent provoke us to ask if the terms continue to represent real divisions, or if usage and habit have drained them of any real meaning. And how have literary texts sought to represent and elucidate the divisions and to complicate and undermine such rigid categories? This collection of essays considers such questions and offers some tentative and original answers. The essays in North and South treat a wide variety of topics, both generically and geographically. Within their localized framework of North and South, they interrogate the elusive topic of boundaries symbolic and literal; boundaries as means of communication rather than division; boundaries that define borderlands; boundaries that invite transgression; and boundaries that resist erasure. Across and within these boundaries, the theme of identity emerges: international, national, regional, gendered, racial, and ethnic.