This volume is unique in its focus on cross-fertilisation in the arts, on very specific exploration of liminal spaces, and on the representation of marginal figures in writing. The essays here grew out of the Borders and Margins colloquium, held at Leeds Trinity University, UK, in April 2010, which was the fourth in a series of colloquia. This collection, moreover, contributes to a growing area of scholarship which explores Anglo-French interactions and exchanges. In choosing the term “liminality”, the editors are aware of its nuanced implications, allowing suggestions both of the initial and the transitional. The contributors here are academics from the fields of literature, history and art history, and their essays cover art history, literature, cultural history, the arts, and faith. Altogether, this collection evokes a sense of temporal shift, in that changes in values and focus are uncovered as the nineteenth century progresses. Some have an ekphrastic quality, showing how pictures can have a narrative, and how pictures, as well as texts, can be encoded with moral and social interpretations. Close scrutiny is applied to different kinds of texts, fiction and non-fiction, and the purposes for which they were produced. This book will appeal to scholars and academics interested in a wide range of cross-categorisational transactions in nineteenth-century Britain. It will be of interest to scholars of Victorian culture, and English nineteenth-century literature and art, particularly in terms of genre, as well as to academics interested in the development of social, personal, and national identities.

This edited book provides a unique opportunity for international scholars to contribute to the exploration of liminality in the field of Anglo-American literature written by or about women between the Victorian period and the Second World War.

Liminal Dickens is a collection of essays which cast new light on some surprisingly neglected areas of Dickensâ (TM)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 Dickensâ (TM)s works, relatively little has been said about his representations of these moments and ceremonies. Similarly, although there have been discussions of Dickensâ (TM)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 Dickensâ (TM)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 Dickensâ (TM)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.

Landscapes of Liminality expands upon existing notions of spatial practice and spatial theory, and examines more intricately the contingent notion of “liminality” as a space of “in-between-ness” that avoids either essentialism or stasis. It capitalises on the extensive research that has already been undertaken in this area, and elaborates on the increasingly important and interrelated notion of liminality within contemporary discussions of spatial practice and theories of place. Bringing together international scholarship, the book offers a broad range of cross-disciplinary approaches to theories of liminality including literary studies, cultural studies, human geography, social studies, and art and design. The volume offers a timely and fascinating intervention which will help in shaping current debates concerning landscape theory, spatial practice, and discussions of liminality.

Hannah Lauren Murray shows that early US authors repeatedly imagined lost, challenged and negated White racial identity in the new nation. In a Critical Whiteness reading of canonical and lesser-known texts from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb, Murray argues that White characters on the border between life and death were liminal presences that disturbed prescriptions of racial belonging in the early US. Fears of losing Whiteness were routinely channelled through the language of liminality, in a precursor to today's White anxieties of marginalisation and minoritisation.

This edited volume aims to problematise and rethink the contemporary European migrant crisis in the Central Mediterranean through the lens of the Black Mediterranean. Bringing together scholars working in geography, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies, this volume takes the Black Mediterranean as a starting point for asking and answering a set of crucial questions about the racialized production of borders, bodies, and citizenship in contemporary Europe: what is the role of borders in controlling migrant flows from North Africa and the Middle East?; what is the place for black bodies in the Central Mediterranean context?; what is the relevance of the citizenship in reconsidering black subjectivities in Europe? The volume will be divided into three parts. After the introduction, which will provide an overview of the theoretical framework and the individual contributions, Part I focuses on the problem of borders, Part II features essays focused on the body, and Part III is dedicated to citizenship.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.