This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the relevance of borders and bordering as a spatial paradigm in Anglophone studies. It sets out to provide a critical counter-narrative to the 1990s globalization argument of a "borderless" world by insisting on the significant roles borders play. The essays range in subject matter from geography, history, British and American literature to painting and Reggae music and map out different conceptualisations of the border: place, line, process, contact zones, etc. The volume's cross-border "narrative" serves as a point of communication between the local and the global, between Europe and America, between different literary and artistic genres, thus challenging the divides of geography and literature, between "real" territorial borders and their "fictional" counterparts.

What does psychoanalysis have to offer to anyone reading Samuel Beckett today? How are we to understand Beckett's renowned attraction to the negative, negation and, more widely, negativity in terms other than the earlier cliched perception of Beckett as a tragic nihilist? How can Beckett's personal experience of exile and estrangement be related to his mature writings? Focusing on Beckett's major post-war works, this book attempts to offer a critical challenge to the accepted viewpoints of Beckett's radical negative status not only within psychoanalytic literary criticism with its reductive Freudian motifs, but within Beckett criticism at large. Using the insights of W. R. Bion, Beckett's former analyst, and D. Winnicott, the key themes of emptiness, absence, and negativity, are seen here to have a constructive and creative value. They serve Beckett's art and not the other way round. Who Godot is, or where Godot is, are questions that need never matter.