Naslov
“You don’t belong to land or water”: reading liminal existence in Penelope Fitzgerald's 'Offshore'

Autori
Ukić Košta, Vesna

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
Wavescapes in the Anthropocene conference / - , 2018, 1-1

Skup
Wavescapes in the Anthropocene

Mjesto i datum
Split, Hrvatska, 03.12.2018. - 06.12.2018

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Poster

Vrsta recenzije
Recenziran

Ključne riječi
Fitzgerald, 'Offshore', liminal. free-floater

Sažetak
In her novel 'Offshore', Penelope Fitzgerald gives us a fine portrayal of a small and rather unconventional community of individuals who live on barges on the Thames at Battersea Reach in 1961 or 1962. “The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where in the early 1960s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money” (Fitzgerald 2). Living in the middle of ‘the swinging London’ in which they feel very much like outcasts, each of these protagonists is temporarily (or permanently) adrift and comes to heavily rely on one another. This paper sets out to explore how the muddy Thames foreshore, a sort of a liminal home between the security of dry land and the fickleness of water, between ‘civilization’ and excitement, frames and shapes the fates of our river dwellers. They live on water, at the mercy of the river’s ebbs and flows, yet they never set sail, their lives being at a standstill. After a string of mishaps and tragedies this ‘imagined’ community of houseboaters is towards the end of the novel virtually deconstructed, demonstrating that this kind of free-floating existence never stood a chance of a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti, Književnost

POVEZANOST RADA