Our goal is to keep an up-to-date bibliography of relevant work dealing with liminality in the humanities. If you know of a text which is not included in this list, feel free to get in touch and we will update it.

BOOKS

  • Achilles, J. and Ina Bergmann, editors. Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing. Routledge, 2015.
  • Aguirre, Manuel, Mercedes Bengoechea, and Robert K. Shepherd, eds. Marginal Discourse. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la UAH  1994.
  • Aguirre, Manuel, Roberta Quance, and Phillip Sutton. Margins and Thresholds: an Enquiry into the Concept of Liminality in Text Studies. The Gateway Press, 2000.
  • Aguirre, Manuel. The Thresholds of the Tale: Liminality and the Structure of Fairytales, The Gateway Press, 2007.
  • Bredendick, Nancy (ed). Mapping the Threshold: Essays in Liminal Analysis. The Gateway Press, 2004.
  • Decker, Jessica Elbert, and Dylan Winchock. Borderlands and Liminal Subjects: Transgressing the Limits in Philosophy and Literature. 2017.
  • Downey, Dara, et al., editors. Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place. Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd, 2016.
  • Duffy, Jean. Thresholds of Meaning: passage, ritual and liminality in contemporary French narrative. Liverpool UP, 2011.
  • Henitiuk, Valerie. Embodied Boundaries: Images of Liminality in a Selection of Women-Authored Courtship Narratives. The Gateway Press, 2007.
  • Horvath, Agnes et. al. (editors). Breaking Boundaries : Varieties of Liminality. Berghahn Books, 2018.
  • Jacobson, Kristin J., et al. Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature Thresholds in Women's Writing. 2018.
  • Klapcsik, Sandor. Liminality in fantastic fiction: a poststructuralist approach. McFarland and Co., 2012.
  • Manzanas, Ana and Jesús Benito (eds). The Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays on Liminal Negotiations. The Gateway Press, 2006
  • Onega, S. and Ganteau, JM, editors. Contemporary trauma narratives : liminality and the ethics of form. Routledge, 2014
  • Piqueras, Belén (ed.) Liminal Poetics: or, The Aesthetics of Dissent. The Gateway Press, 2008.
  • Squire, Susan M. Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine. Duke University Press, 2004
  • Strausz, Erzébet. Writing the self and transforming knowledge in international relations : towards a politics of liminality. Routledge, 2018.
  • Soto, Isabel (ed). A Place That Is Not a Place: Essays in Liminality and Text
     The Gateway Press, 2000.
  • Sutton, Phillip (ed). Betwixt-and-between: Essays in Liminal Geography. The Gateway Press, 2002.
  • Thomassen, Bjørn. Liminality and the modern : living through the in-between. Ashgate, 2014.
  • Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors : Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell UP, 1974.
  • Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Cornell UP, 1989.

ARTICLES / CHAPTERS

  • Aguirre, Manuel. “The Phasing of Form: A Liminalist Strategy in Fairytales.” Betwixt-and-Between: Essays in Liminal Geography (ed. Philip Sutton). Madrid: The Gateway Press, Studies in Liminality and Literature 3 (2002), pp. 13-28.
  • Aguirre, Manuel. “The Lure of the Limen: An Introduction to the Concept, Uses and Problems of Liminality.” The TRELLIS Papers 1, 2006.
  • Aguirre, Manuel. “Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Question of Liminality.” Trends in English Studies, edited by Ignasi Navarro and Nieves Alberola. Castellón de la Plana: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Jaume I, 2006, pp. 123-37.
  • Aguirre, Manuel. "Narrative Structure, Liminality, Self-Similarity: The Case of Gothic Fiction." Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. Ed. Clive Bloom. MacMillan, 2007, pp. 226-47.
  • Aguirre, Manuel and Esteban Pujals. “Liminality and the 18th Century: Outline of a Research Project.” The Northanger Library Project. Madrid: The Gateway Press 2008,   http://www.northangerlibrary.com/nlproject.html.
  • Aguirre, Manuel. “Thick Description and the Poetics of the Liminal in Gothic Tales.” Orbis Litterarum Universarum 72:4 (2017), pp. 294–317.
  • Aguirre, Manuel. “Liminality.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (ed. Jeffrey R. di Leo). London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2018, pp. 553-54.
  • Aguirre, Manuel. “A Gothic-Folktale Interface.” Gothic Studies 21/2 (2019), pp. 159-175.
  • Bredendick, Nancy. “Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon from a Liminalist Perspective.” The TRELLIS Papers 3 (2007).
  • Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Rethinking Postmodern Liminality: Marginocentric Characters and Projects in Thomas Pynchon's Polysystemic Fiction.” symploke, vol. 5 no. 1, 1997, pp. 27-47.
  • Fongang, Delphine. "Cosmopolitan Dilemma: Diasporic Subjectivity and Postcolonial Liminality in Teju Cole's Open City." Research in African Literatures, vol. 48 no. 4, 2017, pp. 138-154.
  • Kenaan, Vered Lev. "Artemidorus at the Dream Gates: Myth, Theory, and the Restoration of Liminality." American Journal of Philology, vol. 137 no. 2, 2016, pp. 189-218.
  • Knutson, Lin. "Monster Studies: Liminality, Home Spaces, and Ina Vampires in Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling." University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 87 no. 1, 2018, pp. 214-233.
  • Kyulanova, Irina. "From Soldiers to Children: Undoing the Rite of Passage in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone and Bernard Ashley’s Little Soldier." Studies in the Novel, vol. 42 no. 1, 2010, pp. 28-47.
  • Lougy, Robert E. "Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens's Bleak House." ELH, vol. 69 no. 2, 2002, pp. 473-500.
  • Nowlin, Steele. "Between Precedent and Possibility: Liminality, Historicity, and Narrative in Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale." Studies in Philology, vol. 103 no. 1, 2006, pp. 47-67
  • O'Rawe, Ricki and Quance, Roberta. "Crossing the Threshold: Mysticism, Liminality, and Remedios Varo’s Bordando el manto terrestre (1961–2)." Modern Languages Open, 2016.
  • Palmer, R. Barton. "The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality." symploke, vol. 15 no. 1, 2007, pp. 66-79
  • Rozelle, Lee. “Resurveying DeLillo's “White Space on Map”: Liminality and Communitas in Underworld.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 42, no. 4, 2010, pp. 443–452.
  • Ruthner, Clemens. "Fantastic Liminality: A Theory Sketch." Collision of Realities. Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe, edited by Böger, A. and Schmeink, L. De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 49-63.
  • Soto, Isabel. ‘Betwixt-and-Between: The Case of Our Nig.’ Myth and Ritual in African American and Native American Literatures, edited by L.P.Alonso & M.M.Gallego. Universidad de Huelva, 2001, 207-220.
  • Soto, Isabel. “Liminality and Transgression in Langston Hughes’ Mulatto.” Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica, vol. 26, 2002, 263-271.
  • Soto, Isabel. “The Border Paradigm in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.” Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (eds. Jesús Benito & Ana M. Manzanas). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, pp. 51-61.

RELATED MATERIAL

“Let's talk about genre”: Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation: An enlightening discussion on genre between the two contemporary writers. This interesting dialogue offers, among other things, the perspective of two modern authors on the liminal nature of literary genres.

Last updated November 3rd, 2019