Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Contributors -- Crossing Boundaries-Delegates -- Introduction -- 'So Childish and So Dreadfully Un-Childlike': Cultural Constructions of Idiocy in the Mid-Nineteenth Century -- 'Aberrant Passions and Unaccountable Antipathies': Nervous Women, Nineteenth-Century Neurology and Literary Text -- X-Club not X-Files: Walter Pater, Spiritualism and Victorian Scientific Naturalism -- Scientific Prophecies and Modern-Day Seers: Prognostication in the Industrial Fiction of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell -- Popular Cosmology as Mythic Narrative: A Site for Interdisciplinary Exchange -- Translation as Gay Deception -- The Mark of Desire: Rewriting the Romance and Lesbian-Feminist Textual Strategies -- Constructing the Female Self in Migrant Postcolonial Fiction -- Locating the 'Nigga' in 'The Wood-Pile': Robert Frost, the Academy and Pedagogy in the Context of a South African Tertiary Education -- Enervation in Language as Innovation in Literature: The Function of Cliché in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy -- Reading Between the Lines: Materiality in the Age of Hypertext -- Music to Desire By: Crossing the Berlin Wall with Wim Wenders -- 'Fictional Capital': Economics and Narrative in the Novels of Jay Mclnerney -- Bourdieu versus Deconstruction: The Social (Con)Text of Irony and Reality -- Performance Theory, Practice and the Intrusion of the Real -- Writing on Air -- Aesthetics and Politics -- Index of Authors -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.