Violent Liminalities in Early Modern Culture

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''. T