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In her Earthsea cycle, Ursula K. Le Guin explores the finer nuances of itinerant heterotopias and the transitions and transformations they enable. Drawing mostly on Michel Foucault's heterotopia of the boat/ship, but also on Margaret Cohen's chronotope of the ship, this paper distinguishes between these two variations in Le Guin's series. The fragile boats in which the young wizard Ged crosses the world of Earthsea and his own tormented mindscapes, in search of the shadow born of his reckless mishandling of magic, is a metaphor for the self, and the voyage is one of self-discovery and of passing from adolescence to maturity. By contrast, the majestic ship in which King Lebannen and his companions sail to parlay with the dragons represents a microcosm of Earthsea's cultures and a union of previously disparate elements: a coming together which foreshadows the subsequent healing of an ancient rift. Thus, the different uses of the same heterotopic space in the first and last book of the series point to a shift in Le Guin's focus, from the personal to the political, from magic to secular power, and from knowledge of the self to knowledge of the world.

This year's issue of Cultural Intertexts brings together seventeen studies on public discourses and private histories, foregrounding their artistic and linguistic, cultural and political cores. A book review rounds up the collection. The contributors are scholars and researchers from eight countries, who have different professional backgrounds, but who share an interest in decoding the inner workings of texts and in analysing the specificities of related contexts. In the articles collected here, they interrogate the cultural politics identifiable in literature, film, television shows, written press, patristics, translations, social media, photography, music, cartoons and internet memes; read between/beyond circumstances of production and realities as constructs; dive into painful memories of the politically and/or ethnically marginalized; or approach fiction with both older and newer critical tools. The corpus under focus, as well as the topics approached, are as diverse as the authorship itself: from adaptations of Renaissance drama to Sci-Fi heterotopic worlds; from the optimistic rise of the novel in the eighteenth century to the grim dystopias of the last decades of the twentieth century or to the complicated postmodernist literary games of the twenty-first; from cultural translations of the Bible to suffering, injustice and othering; from the sound of music to the voice of the discontent crowd in protests or to sarcastic visual commentaries on political figures; from colonialist, superior gazes on the lesser Other to contemporary perspectives on bilingualism as a binding element of otherwise colliding cultures. The book review also highlights collision, juxtaposition, intertextuality in essence, matching the overall attempts of the volume to investigate clashing opposites while identifying potential common grounds.