Book excerpt: Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. This fascinating study provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to these leading poets and the public, during the early years of the Nineteenth-Century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.