According to Terry Eagleton, Outsiders are the literary mainstream: those who appear from the margins to write about liminal spaces and underdog characters are destined for success in publishing. But naturally we might wonder if, having relinquished their outsider status and specific experiences of life on the periphery, do the works and views of such writers become normalised by mainstream culture? Through such thinking, the homogenized outsider becomes a sign of hope in the late-capitalist machinery of productivity, a vessel through which representations of transcendence complement a politicized denial of waste and want.

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Albert Camus’ outsider, Meursault, defies such late-capitalist logic. His tragic path towards the guillotine bucks the trend of protagonists who ‘make good in the end’. The outsider is stigmatized for refusing to network, conform and feel ‘correctly’. Meursault’s life is deemed criminal, related to experiences, real and fictional, of those who are cast aside, ignored and separated from society through legislative and illegal measures. Outsiders include persons marginalised due to racial difference, sexual preference, class identification, or the always-murky application of the idea of Otherness. Equally, among their ranks are the homeless, the zero-contracted and the senile.

Those who are situated on the ‘outside’ are often portrayed as being synthesised into the dominant culture, or conversely punished or excised from it. Interestingly, though Outsiders may become controlled or subsumed, they remain a source of often voyeuristic fascination, opening up perspectives and debates concerning power, disenfranchisement and hinterlands between visibility and invisibility. Who and what is working outside of our spheres of knowledge, and how? What forms do outsiders express themselves in? What does being an outsider mean?

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