Southern Imagining

Professor Elleke Boehmer holds a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship 2020 for her project Southern Imagining. Southern Imagining is a major literary history that explores responses to the early myths and legends of the far southern hemisphere by a range of its modern writers, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin and Olive Schreiner through to Borges, Coetzee, Frame, and Alexis Wright.

Placing emphasis on stories of the south about the south, the book questions and reshapes influential northern imaginative norms, such as of the hostile antipodes and the distant 'Global South'. It considers how northern tales of mythical southern lands have moulded global perceptions of these worlds and explores the environmental consequences of these imaginings.