Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction. By Hannah Lauren Murray. Edinburgh, UK: Univ. of Edinburgh Press. 2021. viii, 208 pp. Cloth, $105.00; e-book, $105.00.
This monograph argues that “liminal” characters and voices in early US fiction signal anxieties pertaining to the construction, durability, and restoration of whiteness. For Murray, the term liminal refers not so much to an in-between status as to a “threat of discorporation”—a felt sense that the white male body in particular has lost standing and needs desperately to reestablish dominance. At a historical moment when abstract ideas of citizenship and national belonging were being established and fused to burgeoning notions of whiteness, spectral figures of liminality haunted novels and short stories to signal the precarity of this fundamentally unstable ideological fusion. Employing a blended methodology sourced from critical whiteness studies, New Historicism, and New Formalism, this study will be of interest for scholars of critical...
