ABSTRACT
This chapter contends that the liminal temporal frames employed in Robert Louis Stevenson's texts "the beach of Falesá" and "Markheim" evoke a distance that is central to the texts' romantic and Gothic aesthetics, displacing the concept of time as static, and disrupting the notion of a unified human identity. This distance is achieved through three techniques: first, the deployment of what David Leon Higdon has termed "barrier time frames", which move through the text to foreshadow later events; second, the nullification or rejection of conventional timekeeping techniques and measurements by ambiguous references to time; and finally, the texts' engagement of irregular narrative temporality to describe particular Gothic moments. In the map that formed the frontispiece of Island Nights' Entertainments, one can see that the beach itself acts as a liminal space between the external world, and the space of the island.
