Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison

Spatiality has become increasingly important to modernist studies (as to literary studies more broadly), but space in terms of religious practice is under-researched in the field. This chapter considers the intersection of liminal spaces and ritual practices in a diverse body of texts from Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison. Following an increasing interest in ideas of the everyday within modernist studies, this chapter explores how these writers illustrate the ways ritual is not tied to transcendence, but known in relation to familiar places and experience. Kathleen Stewart describes the practices, places and connections of daily life as refrains that allow us to live, contributing to the worlding of the everyday. Although Stewart does not class her ‘refrains’ as rituals, their repetitive, deliberate nature aligns them with ritual.1 Ritual allows the accumulation of affect to inhere in particular places and practices.