The contributors to this volume all respond in their own ways to the general topic suggested by the concept of New Worlds, interpreting this term geographically, philosophically, or historically, or responding to it in a very personal fashion. While the common thread running through most of these essays and poems is the discovery, construction and deconstruction of identity, the authors withstand the temptations of a reductive thematic reading of literary texts that relies on totalizing concepts of identity. Rather, they respond to and acknowledge the complexities that the encounter with various forms of the unknown can take in the "old" and "new" literatures written in English.