SLL3 Betwixt-and-Between: Essays in Liminal Geography
Philip Sutton (ed.), 2002
ISBN 84-931843-1-4

In a culturally and historically varied selection of texts, the seven contributors to this volume identify liminal sites whose properties are then determined on the basis of an analysis of the geographies they simultaneously link and separate. Aguirre shows how the laws of reality are suspended in the narrative structures of fairy tales, making them analogous to rites of passage. Gallego and Soto interpret racial hybridity as a liminal condition in a variety of African American literary texts. Healy and Messent scrutinize the threshold that separates civilization from barbarity in the context of early modern England, and in its reflection in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter.
Quance’s study of the Don Juan myth invokes the passage from life to death, whilst Pujal’s review of English Neoclassicism focuses on the relation between art and politics. Across this diversity of texts and critical approaches, the liminal emerges as a space defined by powerful neighbours, yet always paradoxically infused with emancipatory dreams.