The MMES programme itself: without unduly neglecting traditional concerns of literary and cultural studies, we pride ourselves on focusing our attention on cultural areas of transition, cross-over, conflict, mediation, negotiation and compromise, and on the processes that take place in these. We explore the fertile though often neglected areas between literature and folklore, between tradition and modernity, between canonical and popular cultures, between art and reality; the ‘zones’ that constitute such a prominent part of Postmodernist fiction, but equally the heterotopias of horror and science-fiction; the betwixt-and-between nature of visual poetry; the intermedial character of drama and film; the différance between languages that is verbalised in translation; the intangible time-frontiers in postcolonial studies; the interdisciplinary and the intertextual. We turn borders into our centres, and in so doing we deal with the most dynamic aspects of the literary process.