Liminal and liminoid discourses in modernist women’s short fiction : performance, spectatorship, and cinema.

In this chapter, the connections between Dorothy Richardson’s and Virginia Woolf’s short fiction and their essays on film are considered in relation to early-twentieth century dialogues between cinema and short fiction. The anthropologist Victor Turner’s theories of the liminal and “liminoid” are evoked as conceptual tools for analysing these interrelationships in the light of gaps in narrative between performance and spectatorship, perception and representation, and presence and absence. These liminal spaces, existing within the texts and between the genres of short fiction and cinema, enable the reappraisal not only of dominant categories of identity, but also aesthetic and canonical distinctions.