Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between is an interdisciplinary study of the major lyric poems of seventeenth-century British metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The poet and his work have generally proven enigmatic to scholars because both refuse to fit into normal categories and expectations. This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of his representative lyrics in the context of the anthropological concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner and enriched by Arnold Van Gennep, Jacques Lacan, and other observers of the in-between aspects of experience. The approach differs from previous attempts to “explain” Marvell in that it allows multidisciplinary and multi-media contexts in a broad matrix of the areas of experience and representation that defy boundaries, that blur the line at which entrance becomes exit. This study acknowledges that the poems discussed, and, by implication, the entire corpus of Marvell’s work and the life that produced it, derive from a refusal to draw a definite divide. In analyzing a small selection of Marvell’s life and lyrics as explorations of various realms of liminality in word and image, readers can see a passageway to the poet’s works that never really reaches a destination; instead, the unlimited possibilities of the journey remain. Thus, the in-between aspects of the poet and his poetry actually define his technique as well as his brilliance.

What’s new about the apocalypse? Revelation does not allow us to look back after the end and enumerate pivotal turning points. It happens in an immediate encounter with the transformatively new. John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics attempt to render the experience of such an apocalyptic change in the present. In this respect they take seriously the Reformation’s insistence that eschatology is a historical phenomenon. Yet these poets are also reacting to the Regicide, and, as a result, their works explore very modern questions about the nature of events, what it means for a significant historical occasion to happen. Lyric Apocalypse argues that Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics challenge any retrospective understanding of events, including one built on a theory of revolution. Instead, these poems show that there is no “after” to the apocalypse, that if we are going to talk about change, we should do so in the present, when there is still time to do something about it. For both of these poets, lyric becomes a way to imagine an apocalyptic event that would be both hopeful and new.

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This monograph studies how, across the Folio of 1681, Marvell's poems engage not merely with different kinds of loss and aspiration, but with experiences of both that were, in mid-seventeenth-century England, disturbingly new and unfamiliar. It particularly examines Marvell's preoccupation with the search for home, and with redefining the homeland, in times of civil upheaval. In doing so it traces his progression from being a poet who plays sophisticatedly with received myth to being one who is a national mythmaker in rivalry with his poetic contemporaries such as Waller and Davenant. Although focusing primarily on poems in the Folio of 1681, this book considers those poems in relation to others from the Marvell canon, including the Latin poems and the satires from the reign of Charles II. It closely considers them as well in relation to verse by poets from the classical past and the European, especially English, present.

Andrew Marvell, Sexual Orientation, and Seventeenth-Century Poetry examines the important Interregnum/Restoration poet Andrew Marvell against a background of his contemporary lyric poets. His major works from the early elegies to the later political pieces are discussed with a view to unmasking the poet’s own sexuality and his reflection of prevailing sexual attitudes. Popular poems like the Mower poems and “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn” are explicated in depth as well as lesser known poems like “The Unfortunate Lover” and “The Gallery.” Marvell, often described as a “chameleon” has teased readers for hundreds of years. This new book will help both new readers as well as established Marvellians to understand cryptic sexual meanings and references in the verses. Poems are explicated against current heteronormative theory as well as recent work on homoeroticism, autoeroticism, and celibacy. George Klawitter has devoted much of his recent scholarly life to a study of Marvell’s lyric pieces and brings to this new book fresh insights into the suggestive intent of the poet’s works.

Liminal Dickens is a collection of essays which cast new light on some surprisingly neglected areas of Dickens’s writings: the rites of passage represented by such transitional moments and ceremonies as birth/christenings, weddings/marriages, and death. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the family in Dickens’s works, relatively little has been said about his representations of these moments and ceremonies. Similarly, although there have been discussions of Dickens’s religious beliefs, neither his views on death and dying nor his ideas about the afterlife have been analysed in any great detail. Moreover, this collection, arising from a conference on Dickens held in Thessaloniki in 2012, explores how Dickens’s preoccupation with these transitional phases reflects his own liminality and his varying positions regarding some main Victorian concerns, such as religion, social institutions, progress, and modes of writing. The book is composed of four parts: Part One concerns Dickens’s tendency to see birth and death as part of a continuum rather than as entirely separate states; Part Two looks at his unconventional responses to adolescence as a transitional period and to the marriage ceremony as an often unsuccessful rite de passage; Part Three analyses his partial divergence from certain widely held Victorian views about progress, evolution, sanitation, and the provisions made for the poor; and Part Four focuses on two of his novels which are seen as transgressing conventional genre boundaries.

A study of how literature responds to conditions of political uncertainty, this book rewrites much of what we thought we knew about civil war and Restoration literature. Rather than sparking a decisive break with the past, for many the seventeenth-century’s civil wars opened onto a resolutely indeterminate future.