Violent Liminalities in Early Modern Culture - Inhabiting Contested Thresholds (Hardcover)

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.

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Routledge Studies in Shakespeare
Release date:	November 2022
First published:	2023
Authors:	Kaye McLelland
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	216
ISBN-13:	978-0-367-62085-1
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary theory Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Promotions
LSN:	0-367-62085-5
Barcode:	9780367620851

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