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Part of
Language in Place: Stylistic perspectives on landscape, place and environment
Edited by Daniela Francesca Virdis, Elisabetta Zurru and Ernestine Lahey
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 37] 2021
► pp. 65–84

Chapter 4
Liminal islands

A cognitive stylistic analysis of “Beyond the Pale” and “Rathlin” by Derek Mahon

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This chapter uses Text World Theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007) in conjunction with Stockwell’s model of literary resonance (2009) to analyse the mechanisms by which liminal spaces are created and developed in two poems by Derek Mahon. The analysis will focus on how liminal spaces are used in the poems to effect co-presences. In ‘Beyond the Pale’ a sense of loneliness and longing is created through the superimposition of topographically similar but distant landscapes, allowing wished co-presences to be made tantalisingly close, but never realised. While in ‘Rathlin’ a liminal seascape allows for the possibilities of temporal co-presences in a space which is outside of our normal conception of time. The study will show that the combination of Text World Theory with the attentional tracking capabilities of the resonance model offers a more dynamic version of Text World Theory that attends to text-worlds in attentional relation to each other over time, which in turn helps to create the liminal effects of the poems.
Keywords: liminality, Text World Theory, resonance, poetry, Derek Mahon
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Liminality
  • 3.Text World Theory
  • 4.Resonance
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1“Beyond the Pale”
    • 5.2“Rathlin”
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 15 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.37.04mcl
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