Transcending Boundaries: Migrations, Dislocations, and Literary Transformations

The thirty-four peer-reviewed papers by most distinguished scholars and carefully chosen pieces of creative writing by some of the foremost Anglophone writers from all over the world which are published in this volume were conscientiously selected from the lectures given at the latest CISLE conference to date, held at Ljubljana in 2018. Its theme “Transcending Boundaries: Migrations, Dislocations, and Literary Transformations” was chosen deliberately as it is open to the discussion of a great variety of topical social, cultural, and literary dimensions, with diverse aspects of migration and its transnational turn emerging as the most analysed topics. The authors of the present articles predominantly address the questions of how the diverse reasons, multifaceted consequences, and far-reaching implications of international migrations have found expression in literary works written in English and, in the process, how the attempts to render the shifting affiliation between place and individual identity have themselves expanded literary and genre frontiers. Our theme is also symbolically reflected in the cover picture of this volume, the famous pedestrianised “three bridges”, Tromostovje, by the architect Jože Plecnik (1872-1957) across the Ljubljanica River in central Ljubljana, bridging the two seemingly different and yet very similar riverbanks.