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Wallace Stevens’s exploration of German cultural elements and figures, including his own heritage, functions as a creative source for his poetry and prose. While his early poetry romanticizes German culture and identity, Stevens grows skeptical in the mid-1930s and 1940s when his references to Germany increasingly inform his questioning of poetry’s collective relevance and function. In several poems including “Martial Cadenza,” “Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion,” and “Imago,” images of Germany provide key points of departure to contemplate the regenerative potential of the poetic imagination in transcending the exigencies of the external world unsettled by war and destruction.

In a surprising variety of fantasy and children’s fiction, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to recent works by Neil Gaiman, characters move between worlds with different cultural and social norms and values. This chapter explores the pedagogical and literary-critical implications of this trope in texts suitable for anglophone-literature curricula in second-language teacher education programs. It focuses on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), a classic work of children’s literature, and Gaiman’s popular children’s and fantasy fiction, Coraline (2002) and American Gods (2001). Narratives of spatial mobility between worlds, the chapter argues, raise questions of intercultural negotiation and competence, and offer ways for instructors and teacher learners to explore the border-traversing potential of the literary imagination.