Anthony Burgess and modernity provides a variety of new perspectives and contexts for exploring Burgess's literature and music. A range of international scholars and critics explore the writer's novels, music and linguistic productions to explore and define how Burgess contributed to modernist and postmodernist art. The scholars who contributed to the book provide original explorations of Burgess's work and the theological, psychological, linguistic, literary and musical contexts in which Burgess's achievements can best be understood. It will appeal to scholars and students, but it also offers an appreciation of Burgess's artistic achievements that will provide general readers of Burgess's work with an insight into some of the exciting contexts in which Burgess novels can be read. -- .

The essays in this book offer new perspectives on the concept of liminality. They explore the relevance and significance of the limen or threshold from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, and across a broad range of historical periods. The authors all seek to revisit key questions raised in recent literary and cultural criticism, whilst also moving that discussion in new directions. In particular, the essays stress the importance of defining liminality for particular literary and cultural contexts, and highlight the fact that whilst it is liberating and progressive in some instances, in others it is violent and oppressive. Examining texts from the early modern to the postmodern periods, by authors on both sides of the Atlantic, the volume embraces a wide range of literary forms, including novels, travel narratives, religious texts, and philosophical treatises; it also includes consideration of non-literary forms of representation such as photography. This book reveals the complexity of the concept of liminality, and underscores its powerfulness and potential for understanding the ways in which both individuals and communities, in the past and in the present day, negotiate states of transition, and give expression to their experience of being 'in-between'.