: «A dream within a dream»: Liminality and poetic creation in Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia and Irene Vallejo’s El silbido del arquero
Abstract
This paper is a comparative study of two contemporary novels which rewrite Virgil’s Aeneid: Usula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia and Irene Vallejo’s El silbido del arquero. Two secondary female characters in the epic poem, Lavinia and Anna, are closely related to Virgil’s presence as a character through Lavinia’s direct dialogues with him and her metafictional self-awareness, and, in the case of Ana, in terms of characterisation and intratextuality. Both protagonists are liminal figures: they live on the borderline between different worlds, childhood and adulthood, the powerful and the lowly, palace life and nature, the divine and the human, life and death. Their stories are simultaneously told and untold in the Aeneid. Their metafictional and liminal identity turns them into vehicles for a meditation on Virgil’s poetic creation, a key element to these narratives.
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