Liminality and the Short Story

Jochen Achilles is Professor of American Studies at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. His authored book publications include a study on the development of Sean O'Casey's plays in the context of modern drama and a book on the interface between the gothic tradition and psychological fiction, focusing on Sheridan Le Fanu. His most recent book publications are co-edited volumes on representations of evil in fiction and film (2009) and on liminal anthropologies (2012).

This book is a study of the short story, one of the widest taught genres in English literature, from an innovative methodological perspective. Both liminality and the short story are well-researched phenomena, but the combination of both is not frequent. This innovative collection discusses the relevance of the concept of limina

Part I: Liminality and the Short Story 1.1 Uses of Liminality 1. "Betwixt and Between": Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Short Fiction Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann Part II: The Liminality of the Short Story 2.1 Conceptualizations of Liminality 2. Modes of Liminality in American Short Fiction: Condensations of Multiple Identities Jochen Achilles 3. Liminal and Liminoid Discourses in Modernist Women's Short Fiction: Performance, Spectatorship, and Cinema Claire Drewery 4. In the Generic Interzone: On the Liminal Character of William S. Burroughs's Routines Florian Zappe 2.2 Methods of Approach 5. Cognitive Liminality: On the Epistemology of the Short Story Michael Basseler 6. Experiencing Short Stories: A Cognitive Approach Focusing on Reading Narrative Space Renate Brosch 7. Between Story and Essay: Micro-Markers of Storyness Susan Lohafer 2.3 Conditions of Publication 8. "Small Tales": Brevity and Liminality in Early American Magazines Oliver Scheiding 9. The Liminal Spaces of Hawthorne's Short Story Cycles: Rites of Passage in History and Story-Telling Alfred Bendixen 10. Variety in Unity, Unity in Variety: The Liminal Space of the American Short Story Anthology Kasia Boddy Part III: Liminality in the Short Story 3.1 Contexts of Writing 11. "I Have Heard Many Stranger Stories than This, in the Villages Along the Hudson": Magic Realism in Upstate New York Ina Bergmann 12. Madness as a Liminal State in the American Short Story: Edgar Allan Poe's Ratiocin