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On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing.Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.

Scholars in the field of children's literature studies began taking an interest in the concept of “liminal spaces” around the turn of the 21st century. For the first time, Liminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between brings together in one volume a collection of original essays on this topic by leading children's literature scholars. The contributors in this collection take a wide variety of approaches to their explorations of liminal spaces in children's and young adult literature. Some discuss how children's books portray the liminal nature of physical spaces, such as the children's room in a library. Others deal with more abstract portrayals, such as the imaginary space where Max goes to escape the reality of his bedroom in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. All of the contributors, however, provide keen insights into how liminal spaces figure in children's and young adult literature.

This study aims to uncover the traces of the celebrated Sweeney legend in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Austin Clarke, Derek Mahon, Tom Mac Intyre, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Dermot Bolger, Paula Meehan, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. The tale, known in Irish as Buile Suibhne, captivates with its intricate layers of liminality. Liminality, the state of existing on the boundary, the border, the threshold, serves as the key to bringing these writers together. This liminal state is marked by the promise of a drastic shift, a metamorphosis of being. The legend's profound impact on literary creations bears witness to the contemplation of liminality lying at the heart of the Irish imagination. Close textual readings bring to light the significance of Sweeney's Revival, which reverberates with far-reaching and enduring resonance.

Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth tackles the reenchantment process at work in a part of contemporary ecoliterature that is marked by the resurfacing of the song of the earth topos and of Gaia images. Focusing on the postmodernist braiding of various indigenous and ecofeminist ontologies, close readings of the animistic and totemic dimensions of the stories at hand lead to the theorizing of liminal realism—a mode that shares much with magical realism but that is approached through an ecopoetic lens, specifically working an interspecies kind of magic, situating readers in-between human and other-than-human worlds. This book promotes a worldview based on relationships of reciprocity and symbiosis. It restores our capacity for wonder together with our sensitive intelligence. Liminal realism adopts a stance in-between scientific, mythical, and poetic worldviews as it calls attention to the soundscapes, odorscapes, feelscapes, and landscapes of the world. This monograph offers an original transdisciplinary and cross-Atlantic take on ecopoetics as it straddles the two academic worlds and sparks a conversation between artworks, theories, and studies emerging from the English-speaking world as well as from Francophone contexts.Entangling the materiality of language back within the flesh of the world, this book and the texts under study provide insight into the fundamentally sympoietic dimension of ecopoiesis.

This collection studies the representations of the character of the monarch in literature and cinema. Being a person, an institution, a character archetype and a narrative role, the characters of the monarch and other royal or regal characters oscillate between humanity and the non-human. As such, they are hybrid forms of existence and subjectivity. The authors of this collection explore this hybridity across large spectra of genres, historical periods and cultural contexts. Some of the most prolific and widely read scholars analyze the archetype of the monarch on the page, the stage and the screen. They cover large swathes of intersecting creative and interpretive territories including ancient epic and religious poetry, Arthurian legends, British Renaissance and modern drama, British horror films and Hollywood crime and sports films. This collection also features interviews with six prominent comic book writers and artists, who discuss the influence of classical royal archetypes on their works.

Cet ouvrage propose d'explorer la problématique de l'entre-deux dans les écrits de plusieurs écrivaines françaises et francophones « d'ici et d'ailleurs », en particulier dans les récits (auto)biographiques. En tant qu'outil herméneutique, l'entre-deux permet de mieux identifier et interpréter les ruptures et les jonctions possibles entre différents systèmes de pensée et pratiques d'écriture du monde contemporain. Chacun des cinq chapitres porte principalement sur un type particulier d'entre-deux – générique, spatio-temporel, mémoriel, gastronomique et scriptural – sans pour autant se limiter à la représentation d'un seul d'entre eux. La traversée (réelle ou imaginaire) de cet espace insaisissable engendre toujours de nouvelles significations qui émergent à travers des formes narratives hybrides, révélant le potentiel des interstices de devenir des intervalles de sens grâce aux rencontres et aux échanges qui s'y produisent. Tout au long de ce livre, trois questions se posent de façon récurrente : (1) quelle manière d'habiter le monde est illustrée par les récits témoignant de la complexité de l'entre-deux, source de souffrances, mais aussi de richesse et de renouveau identitaire? (2) quelle place accorder aux histoires individuelles dans l'éclairage de la grande Histoire? (3) quel rapport entretiennent les femmes avec leur écriture qui se situe entre le questionnement de l'être et du monde? Ce livre est destiné principalement à un public universitaire qui s'intéresse à la littérature contemporaine d'expression française, aux études de femmes, aux études de genre et aux études culturelles.

Violent liminalities in Early Modern Culture is a methodologically innovative book combining the twin disciplines of queer theory and disability studies. It investigates the violence feared from, and directed at, inhabitants of the ‘betwixt and between'spaces of early modern literature and culture, through a focus on the perpetuated metamorphic states of Shakespeare's and Spenser's liminal figures including Lavinia, Puck, and Britomart. With chapters on gender, sexuality, adolescence, madness, and physical disability, Kaye McLelland applies a bi-theoretical lens to interrogate the ways in which being simultaneously ‘neither'and ‘both'brings to bear the non-normative disruption identified by queer theory in ways that use binary systems against themselves. For many of Spenser's and Shakespeare's characters, the ‘in-between'state, whether ritually or otherwise induced, transforms the instantaneous binary threshold of the limen into a permanent ‘habitation'. This created space is one of great power that is feared and violently countered by those who would shut it down. Set against the literary history of Spenser's and Shakespeare's Ovidianism and festivity, and the historical context of the post-Reformation transformation from a tertiary to a binary model of the afterlife, this volume identifies a persistent positioning of liminal literary figures in proximity to the liminality of the dead and dying, whilst simultaneously tracing the positive ways in which these inhabitants of the powerful ‘betwixt and between'are depicted.