Contemporary Rewritings of Liminal Women

Miriam Borham-Puyal lectures at the English Department of the University of Salamanca. She is the author of the monograph Quijotes con enaguas. Encrucijada de géneros en el siglo XVIII británico (2015) and has published extensively on British quixotes. She has also authored pieces on women writers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including Jane Austen, Jane Barker, Mary Brunton, Mary Hays, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, Scarlett Thomas, and Mary Wollstonecraft. As part of her research in Digital Humanities, she has published articles on female characters in videogames and women writers online. She is the editor of a volume on rewritings of Frankenstein (2018), which places particular emphasis on film, television, videogames, and e-lit.

1. Introduction: Liminality, Feminocentric Narratives, and the Polytemporality of the New Woman

Liminality and Feminocentric Narratives



Polytemporal (Feminist) History and the Trace



Liminal Women and Popular Narratives



2. Female Vampires: On the Threshold of Time, Space, and Gender

F(r)iends on the Threshold: Let the Right One In



M/Others and Survivors through Time: A Vampire Story and Byzantium



Eternity, Liminal Space, and the Outsider: Only Lovers Left Alive



Empowering Liminal Women: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night



3. Good and Bad, Private and Public: Prostitution as Liminal Identity

Between Monsters and Machines: Frankenhooker



The Freedom of the Prostitute or the Silence of the Wife: Dangerous Beauty



Neo-Victorian Rewritings: Class, Gender, and Commodities in Slammerkin



Sex and Power from the Eighteenth Century to Television: Harlots



4. Between Madness and Rebellion: Rewriting the Female Quixote

Coloring Reality with Romance: from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend



Escaping a Harrowing (Patriarchal) Reality: Pan’s Labyrinth and Sucker Punch



Idealistic Individuals in a Fallen World: Amélie and The Bookshop



5. To Be and Not to Be: Female Detectives between Old and New Women



Resurrecting Kate Warne: The Pinkertons and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters



Sherlock’s Sisters at the Turn of the Century: Houdini & Doyle and Phryne Fisher



Invisible Women: Reclaiming the Spy in The Bletchley Circle



Past in the Present, the Gothic in the Noir: Dolores Redondo’s Baztan Trilogy