Liminal Fiction at the Edge of the Millennium

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

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsNote on TranslationsChapter 1: On the Edge: Liminality and Spanish Identity at the Turn of the MillenniumChapter 2: The (Never) Ending Story: Apocalyptic Desire and the Liminal Fiction of Javier Marías's Mañana en la batalla piensa en míChapter 3: History Incarnate and the Liminal Body in Rosa Montero’s La hija del caníbalChapter 4: Second-Hand Identity: Limbs, Liminality, and Transplantation in Manuel Rivas’s A man dos paíñosChapter 5: Ethical In-difference and Liminal Identity in Cristina Fernández Cubas’s Parientes pobres del diabloChapter 6: Scoring the National Hym(e)n: Sexuality, Immigration, and Liminal Identity in Najat El Hachmi’s L’últim patriarcaConclusion: The End of Liminal FictionAfterword/AfterwardWorks CitedIndexAbout the Author

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.