Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium

The Ends of Spanish Identity

Jessica A. Folkart

2014
262 pages
ISBN 9781611485790

Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium: The Ends of Spanish Identity investigates the predominant perception of liminality - identity situated at a threshold, neither one thing nor another, but simultaneously both and neither - caused by encounters with otherness while negotiating identity in contemporary Spain. Examining how identity and alterity are parleyed through the cultural concerns of historical memory, gender roles, sex, religion, nationalism, and immigration, this study demonstrates how fictional representations of reality converge in a common structure wherein the end is not the end, but rather an edge, a liminal ground. On the border between two identities, the end materializes as an ephemeral limit that delineates and differentiates, yet also adjoins and approximates. In exploring the ends of Spanish fiction - both their structure and their intentionality - Liminal Fiction maps the edge as a constitutive component of narrative and identity in texts by Najat El Hachmi, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Javier Marías, Rosa Montero, and Manuel Rivas. In their representation of identity on the edge, these fictions enact and embody the liminal not as simply a transitional and transient mode but as the structuring principle of identification in contemporary Spain.

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Reviews

"Folkart masterfully uses the theories of Emmanuel Lévinas to consider Christina Fernández Cuba's Parientes pobres del diablo (2006) as an exploration of the ethics implicit in identity
formation.... Folkart's writing is clear, concise and eminently readable, giving the lie to the assumption that serious scholarship must equal dry prose. In the final analysis, Folkart's thought provoking, superbly researched, and convincingly argued study of the palimpsest of Spanish identities makes this book an asset to contemporary literary and cultural studies."
- Jason E. Klodt; Letras Femeninas; Vol. 41 No. 1 (2015)

About the author:

Jessica Folkart is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech.

Distributed by Bloomsbury (formerly by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group)

Paperback: 9781611485813; eBook: 9781611485806