This book highlights the multiplicity of American womens writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American womens writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collections introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American womens writing is threshold writing, or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits bordersand offers enticing openings.

Kristin J. Jacobson is Professor of American Literature, Womens, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies at Stockton University, USA. Her book,Neodomestic American Fiction, examines contemporary domestic novels. She has published inGenre,Legacy,Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, and edited collections. Her current book analyzes the American adrenaline narrative. Kristin Allukian is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of South Florida, USA. Her research areas include American literature to 1900, women's literature, and feminist digital humanities. Her current book project examines the relationship between women, work, and labor systems in postbellum American literature. Rickie-Ann Legleitner is Assistant Professor of English and Co-Coordinator of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, USA. Her research and teaching interests include American literature and culture, women writers, and identity and disability studies. Her current book project examines intersectionality inKünstlerromaneby American women writers (1850-1930). Leslie Allison is Assistant Director of the Temple University Writing Center, USA. Her primary research and teaching areas include twentieth-century American literature and womens literature, and her work has appeared inStudies in the Novel. She is currently working on a monograph about postwar women writers representations of adolescent girlhood.

Introduction: Threshold Thinking, Rita Bode and Kristin J. Jacobson.- Section I Early American Thresholds Introduction: Early American Women Writers: The Potentiality of the Continual Self-Creating Act,  Kristin Allukian.- Sweet Cement: Occasioning Bathsheba Bowers An Alarm Sounded to Prepare the Inhabitants of the World to Meet the Lord in the Way of His Judgment, Nicholas K. Mohlmann.- Beyond The Bars: Lucy Terry Prince and the Margins of the Colonial Landscape, Ann A. Huse.- The Liminal Time of Friendship: Narrative Dely in Hannah Webster FostersThe Coquette, Molly Ball.- We cannot be indifferent: Native Americans and the Students of the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, Gregory D. Specter.- Section II Nineteenth Century Thresholds Introduction: Resistance and Alternative Histories in Nineteenth-century Womens Writing, Rickie-Ann Legleitner.- Changing is Surviving: Transformation as Resistance in the Ojibwe Stories of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Sarah Olivier.- Inhabiting the Liminal: The Architecture of Single Life in Catharine Maria Sedgwicks Fiction, Michelle Gaffner Wood.- Contesting Sentimentalism: Animal-Human Bonds and Boundaries in Grace GreenwoodsHistory of My Pets, Kerstin Rudolph.- The Third Sex: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians in Queer, Liminal Literary Spaces, Margaret Jay Jessee.- Costume de ghost: Liminality in Grace KingsBalcony Stories, Stephanie Durrans.- Section III Twentieth-Century  and Twenty-First-Century Thresholds Introduction: A Fragile Optimism: Writing Liminality and Hybridity in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Leslie Allison.-La mujer en llamas: Legal Storytelling in Lucha CorpisBlack Widows Wardrobe, Sandra Ruiz.- States of Exception and Arab American Womens Poetry After 9/11: Liminality and Community in Suheir Hammads first writing since and D.H. Melhems September 11, 2001, World Trade Center, Aftermath, Birgit Spengler.- Still Moving: Gabrielle Bells Graphic Auto-Fiction, Shiamin Kwa.- Extreme Sex: Contemporary American Women Writers at the Margins, Beth Widmaier Capo.- Afterword: Beyond Thresholds: Suggestions for Further Research and Teaching Resources.