Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place

by Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, Elizabeth Parker

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783489855
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	03/24/2018
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.36(w) x 8.57(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dara Downey is an Associate Lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and a Trinity Access Programme tutor. She is the author of American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (Palgrave, 2014), editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and Vice Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies.

Ian Kinane is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, where he teaches popular genre fiction, postcolonial literatures, and children's literature. He is the author of Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and editor of Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade: New Paradigms for Young Readers (Liverpool University Press, 2018). Ian is currently writing a monograph in British-Jamaica cultural relations in Ian Fleming's Jamaica-set James Bond novels, and he is the editor of the peer-review, open-access International Journal of James Bond Studies.

Elizabeth Parker is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary and Popular Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is currently working on her first monograph The Gothic Forest: Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. She is the TV editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and is the co-founder of the upcoming journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic.

Table of Contents

Foreword: “A Utopia of the In-Between”, or, Limning the Liminal, Robert T. Tally Jr / Introduction: Locating Liminality: Space, Place, and the In-Between, Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, and Elizabeth Parker / Section One: Liminal Spaces and Places / 1. Close Listening: Urban Soundscapes in Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, and Berlin Alexanderplatz, Annika Eisenberg / 2. “Cities of the Insane”: The Asylum as Ruin in Recent American Horror Narratives, Bernice M. Murphy / 3. In Between Days: Domestic Liminality in the Work of Aideen Barry, Tracy Fahey / 4. Victorian Fireside Storytelling: Christmas, Ritual, and Liminality in Round the Fire: Six Stories, Kate Forrester / 5. “Weren’t all true nomads at their happiest in limbo?”: Hauntings in Non-Places in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black and Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Kathryn Bird / Section Two: Liminal Identities / 6. Figures in a Foreign Landscape: Aspects of Liminality in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Melanie Otto / 7. Liminal Identities of Migrant Groups: The Old Russian Believers of Romania, Cristina Clopot / 8. “Tinkers”, “Itinerants”, “Travellers”: Liminality and Irish Traveller Identity, Noelle Mann / 9. High Heels and Hard Men: The Liminal Process of Becoming a Warrior, Mark Doyle / 10. Letters of Liminality: Print Texts as Spaces of Transgressive Desire in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit”, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou / Notes on Contributors/
Index

Editorial Reviews

The liminal: a threshold, a transitional space, an area between, an edge or fault line. Cutting a path between place and space, the informed and probing essays in this extraordinary volume reach back to Arnold Van Gennep, Victor Turner and Yi fu Tuan in broadly based inquiry showing how edges are critical junctures of and overlapping borders of knowledge that includes folklore, literature, geography, gender, and visual media. Composed and presented with care, Landscapes of Liminality is a valuable contribution to a growing and compelling field of spatial studies.

Tom Conley

Landscapes of Liminality plots the intersection of the humanities and geographic thought, productively charting a territory in between disciplines. In a set of insightful chapters it explores real and imagined topographies, spatialities and identities, liminal practices, and the spatial poetics of liminality. A useful theoretical and practical guide to liminal geographies.

Rob Kitchin

Landscapes of Liminality provides a welcome contribution to the study of in-between states and spaces, with an eclectic group of essays united by their shared allegiance to the classical anthropological conception of liminality developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. In this it provides a timely counterpoint to the many recent studies that derive their conceptions of liminality from postcolonial or poststructural conceptual frameworks, without losing sight of their concern with the political potentialities contained within liminal moments, transgressive identities, and heterotopic spaces of all kinds.

Eric Prieto

This volume is not only an engaged application of the concept of liminality to issues of space, place and identity. It is much more than that. The volume is comprised of carefully selected chapters that in complementary ways force the reader to think through dominant notions of identity and space through the lens of the in-between, and back again: to deepen our understanding of the liminal dimensions of our times through fascinating case studies of cultural production, identity formation and spatial practice. The book deserves a wide readership across the humanities and social sciences.

Bjørn Thomassen

This collection works a consistent enquiry on a diverse range of ideas of what space/place- and landscape- are. Each keyword is problematic across our disciplines, and here the authors and editors survey this diversity mainly drawn from literature, exploring numerous ‘sites’ always ‘on the edge’ through the idea of liminality, acknowledging that space and place are always uncertain, fluid and vibrant. This interrogation contributes critically to the fluid character of its three key terms, and will contribute to understanding situations of apparently everyday life anywhere.

David Crouch

This volume is not only an engaged application of the concept of liminality to issues of space, place and identity. It is much more than that. The volume is comprised of carefully selected chapters that in complementary ways force the reader to think through dominant notions of identity and space through the lens of the in-between, and back again: to deepen our understanding of the liminal dimensions of our times through fascinating case studies of cultural production, identity formation and spatial practice. The book deserves a wide readership across the humanities and social sciences.

Bjørn Thomassen

This is a bold and impressive collection of essays which deftly explores the complexity of liminality as a key concept across a range of disciplines. Landscapes of Liminality is a brilliant contribution to on-going debates in the new spatial studies and demonstrates the profound importance of the categories of space, place, and liminal identities to our understanding of culture and society.

Andrew Thacker