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 âbetwixt and betweenâ spaces of early modern literature and culture, through a focus on the perpetuated metamorphic states of Shakespeareâs and Spenserâs 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 âneitherâ and âbothâ brings to bear the non-normative disruption identified by queer theory in ways that use binary systems against themselves. For many of Spenserâs and Shakespeareâs characters, the âin-betweenâ state, whether ritually or otherwise induced, transforms the instantaneous binary threshold of the limen into a permanent âhabitationâ. 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 Spenserâs and Shakespeareâs 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 âbetwixt and betweenâ are depicted.
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