ABSTRACT
Coda: The Final Threshold examines the connection between liminality and the life/death threshold, which emerges from each of the discussions in the earlier chapters. Is literature haunted, as Greenblatt suggests in Hamlet in Purgatory, by those who are dispossessed when a tertiary system becomes a binary life/death one that supposes instantaneous transition? The chapter suggests that, in the absence of purgatory, liminality and violence are forced onto the living to be endlessly refracted onto every boundary state. It returns to the bi-theoretical perspective to investigate the role of Spenser and Shakespeare as poets who make a ‘local habitation and a name’ for those who live on the limen.
