Liminality in Fantastic Fiction: A Poststructuralist Approach

This critical work diversifies Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, a basic category of postmodernism, in which distinct categories and hierarchies are questioned and limits erode. Liminality involves an oscillation between cultural institutions, genre conventions, narrative perspectives, and thematic binary oppositions. Grounded on this notion, the text investigates the liminality in Agatha Christie’s detective fiction, Neil Gaiman’s fantasy stories, and Stanislaw Lem’s and Philip K. Dick’s science fiction.

Through an examination of destabilized norms, this analysis demonstrates that liminality is a key element in the changing trends of fantastic texts.

Sandor Klapcsik (Ph.D., Cultural Studies Department, University of Jyväskylä, Finland) was a Fulbright-Zoltai Fellow at the University of Minnesota in 2007-2008 and a Hungarian State ＂Eötvös＂ fellow at the science fiction archives of the University of Liverpool. He lives in Miskolc, Hungary.