Exploring Between Pages

Responding to Liminality in Gothic Literature

What happens when something exists between two states?

• Between human and non-human.
• Between one world and another.
• Between civilised and uncivilised.
• Between reality and unreality.

This four-page printable resource invites you to explore liminality in Gothic literature through four carefully chosen extracts from writers across more than 300 years.

Each passage introduces a different type of literary response. You’ll consider historical context, psychoanalytical ideas, post-colonial perspectives and your own reader response — using the concept of liminality as a thread connecting them.

The four extracts:

• Margaret Cavendish — A Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666) - Explore a world between worlds through a historical reading of this fascinating early proto-Gothic/science-fiction text.
• Mary Shelley — Frankenstein (1818) - Consider what makes us human as you explore the creation’s uncertain position between human and non-human.
• Bram Stoker — Dracula (1897) - Investigate ideas of civilisation, otherness and Victorian anxieties through Jonathan Harker’s encounter with Count Dracula.
• Shirley Jackson — The Haunting of Hill House (1959) - Respond personally to the unsettling spaces between reality and unreality, sanity and insanity, connection and isolation.

Each extract includes a short introduction, contextual guidance and questions to help you develop your response.

What’s included

• Four A4 printable resources, including extracts from texts spanning from the seventeenth to the twentieth century
• Four different approaches to literary response: Historical, psychoanalytical, post-colonial and reader-response
• Questions exploring liminality and boundaries
• Space for your own observations, interpretations and responses

You can research the writers or texts before responding, but you don't have to.

The resource encourages close reading, curiosity and independent interpretation rather than searching for a single correct answer.

You’ll need:

• A printed copy of the resource and something to write with.
• Optional: You may want access to books, online research or other sources if you choose to explore the texts and their contexts further.

Part of the Bookfordshire Curiosity Collection — Liminal: exploring thresholds, boundaries and the spaces between.

Digital printable resource. No physical product will be posted.

© Bookfordshire. For personal use only. Please do not reproduce, resell or redistribute.