Sarah Moss’s novel The Fell (2021) is a fictional reflection upon the second UK lockdown in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to its topicality, the novel is likely to be read as a “time capsule,” preserving the unprecedented experience of social isolation, anxiety and domestic incarceration. Starting with the assumption that living in a time of pestilence may be characterised as a borderline experience, this article argues that The Fell revolves around the paradigm of liminality. For the characters portrayed in the book the threshold is social, psychological and existential. Nevertheless, for the main protagonist the metaphorical and the literal merge when, driven to the limit of endurance, she falls off the edge of a cliff while taking a walk on the fells of the Peak District, in defiance of the quarantine restrictions. The article analyses various meanings of liminality in Moss’s novel.

The article looks at Kathleen Jamie’s collection of essays entitled Surfacing (2019) and explores the issue of narrative in-betweenness and liminality. The focus in the first part of the article is on the liminal features of Jamie’s essays, on the way the collection is designed, but it also discusses the importance of paratexts such as the book cover. It introduces the concept of spiral time, and liminal space-time so characteristic of Jamie’s writing. The second part analyses an essay entitled “A Tibetan Dog” in which Jamie creatively investigates multimodal “threshold” connections between the present and the past, the realm of reality and the realm of dreams, and, last but not least, the link between intellectual knowledge and bodily wisdom. 

B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) and Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) are among the most formally inventive and materially unique literary responses to personal loss. The first novel-in-a-box in English literature, The Unfortunates is a poignant account of the premature death of Johnson’s best friend Tony Tillinghast. Also contained in a box, Carson’s elegy is printed on a 25-metre-long concertinaed scroll, which contains a collage of textual and visual fragments of various artefacts connected with Carson’s dead brother.

This article considers the implications of certain visual and tactile properties of both works for their representation of loss and the work of mourning, as theorized by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. It argues that both the card-shuffle structure and the scroll format accentuate the ongoingness of mourning and convey scepticism about the possibility of any closure. The article also examines the significance of encasing the contents of both elegies in coffin-like boxes and the importance of their extensive use of fragmentation. 

In his autobiographical novel, Promise at Dawn, Romain Gary, in addition to numerous confabulations, also made several borrowings from various works of world literature; a considerable number of these have been identified by researchers. The article adds to this list the hitherto undiscovered plagiarism of Bezgrzeszne lata [Innocent Years] by Kornel Makuszyński, a writer whom Gary read in his youth. One of the most recognisable episodes of Promise at Dawn – the story of the author’s/narrator’s childhood love for Valentina, for whom he ate, among other things, a kilo of cherries with seeds or, finally, the eponymous galosh – bears a striking resemblance to the description of narrator’s love for Inka Leszczyńska in Innocent Years.

In addition to this connection, there are other, less obvious similarities between the two works, related to the authors’ creative paths, their first literary attempts or difficulties at school, and the subsequent experience regarding their first publications. There are also similarities between the authors themselves, both achieving ‘celebrity’ status through their writing successes, both equally averse (with reciprocity) to any avant-garde or political involvement, both adhering to humanist ideals in their writing and seeking to right wrongs and injustices, each in their own way. 

In al-Ğāḥiẓ’s treatise Kitāb Faḫr al-Sūdān calā al-Biḍān, the title of which in the already classic Polish study on Arabic literature was translated as The Superiority of Blacks over Whites, or Treatise on the Superiority of Blacks over Whites, the author of the work lists the characters of black inhabitants of the caliphate; among them he evokes al-Ḥayquṭān, whom he presents as a poet and a preacher of Abyssinian origin. He also quotes al-Ḥayquṭān’s poem, which is a paean to the courage and valor of the Abyssinians, referring to important events that took place in the Arabian Peninsula just before the birth of the Prophet Muḥammad.

In modern times, al-Ḥayquṭān’s poem is used in popular publications and online forums as a historical example of a reaction to racism and a reason to be proud of the bravery of the poem’s dark-skinned characters, as well as the example of literary achievement of the inhabitants of the caliphate of African descent.

The purpose of this article is to refer to the historical events mentioned in the work of the black poet, present him in the context of the few surviving Arabic sources, explore the potential circumstances of the creation of the work and reflect on the actual circumstances of its creation as described by al-Ğāḥiẓ.