Editorial

Abstract

Welcome to the second issue of English for 2010 in which all the contributors join together to invite us to forsake our everyday selves and to explore questions of dislocation and displacement in an unexpectedly wide range of contexts – geographical, intellectual and, indeed, paranormal. Shane McCorristine's discussion ponders the changing representations of the family unit and of familial space in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to illuminate the relatively neglected area of Walter de la Mare's fiction. Here, we are asked to consider the ways in which imagination and cultural ambition are policed in domestic environments, most especially those which involve extended households of dependent kin, servants and other employed staff, such as governesses, who might be ‘coded as out of place’. Most intriguingly, McCorristine asks us to consider the ways in which de la Mare portrays the Victorian family ‘home’ as a site of proliferating experiences of psychic ‘possession’ and material dispossession. Reitha Pattison's article on the spatial politics of the North American poet Edward Dorn builds upon many of the emphases apparent in the preceding analysis of de la Mare's short fiction. Here, we are asked to attend to Dorn's poetic enquiries into ‘embodiment, continence, vacancy, and extension’, and once again to interrogate the ways in which body and place may be appropriated. However, rather than scrutinizing the cultural origins of the post eighteenth-century politics of the family, Pattison urges us to re-engage with traditions of thinking inherited from antiquity on the production and representation of space. In the final phases of the discussion, we are encouraged to concentrate squarely upon the contemporary, and the ways in which Dorn's poetry invests repeatedly in the ‘receding western horizon’ of an explicitly American remoteness.