Time and space are the two dimensions that entail movement and change, which are among a few constants of life. This volume comprises studies of culture that have an important say on mobilities in literature, language, and society. This spatial-temporal perspective is manifested in the structure of this volume divided into three parts.

Part 1, ‘From place to place’, features spatial movement as cultural human expression at physical and metaphysical levels. It opens with Lynne Pearce's chapter, which sheds new light on the mobilities in British literature of the early twentieth century, generative of such emotions as love and mourning. In Mahjoub's novels, Jopi Nyman explores the border-crossing mobility music, which gains new meanings through new encounters and results in new hybridities.

Postcolonial fiction serves as a safe space for the following two chapters, where Elina Valovirta engages with the ambivalent conceptualization of sexuality in Caribbean literature, and Amin Beiranvand & Joel Kuortti analyze the colonialistic barbarism in South Africa and the recontextualization of the roles of the oppressor and the oppressed to justify the physical and mental torture in the interest of the torturer. The last two chapters are concerned with identity and its influence in cultural heritage. This section illustrates an extraordinary case of cultural chameleonism—composer-poet O'Byrne/Bax, whose contested Irish and British identities contribute to the generation of cultural pearls (by Anthony W. Johnson), and the slow transformation process of national identity from British colonists into American citizens, as evidenced by the terminology in a diachronic corpus of letters (by Johanna Rastas).

Part 2, ‘From time to time’, deals with time, through which changes in various literary aspects are observed. In the opening chapter, Mehdi Ghasemi discusses the literary period of postmodernism, which can be old but not old-fashioned, and proposes a new label to it—‘hyperhybridism’. Elina Siltanen presents her mindfulness project where Mayer's poetry is observed as an experiment of movements of the mind. The following three chapters, centering on changes in discourse and communication in the online environment, investigate translators’ attitudes towards their changing practices when confronted with unfamiliar cultural references in fiction (by Damon Tringham); the ways in which plus-size fashion blogging contributes to the discursive construction of the body positivity movement and the fat acceptance movement (by Hanna Limatius); and the discursive articulation of the ‘migrant’ figure in contemporary Hungarian political discourse (by Erzsébet Barát).

Part 3, ‘Between times and places’, opens with Lena Englund's analysis of Doris Lessing's autobiographical writings, where changing positions taken by Lessing are recontextualized through time and regret. Conversely, Ira Hansen's analysis of the repeated rebirths of Ursula Todd represents the movement through layers of fictional life as a way to locate the past, not as a memory experienced in the present, but as present itself. The last two chapters, by Joel Kuortti and by Turo Rautaoja, close the volume with the exploration of the impact of temporal and spatial distance of texts on the change in the representation of people, things, and phenomena.

This volume is a valuable collection of multidisciplinary analytic insights into enigmas of time and space, which are central to the consideration of mobilities and change in literature, language, and society.