The phenomenon of liminality appears in the earliest children’s texts, but the term itself is a coinage from Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner (1969), who drew on _liminaire_, a term used by Arnold Van Gennep in his ethnographical writings on preindustrial societies to designate the middle, transitional stage of a three-stage paradigmatic rite of passage: “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age” (quoted in Turner 1969, 94). Joseph Campbell adapted this construct as a basis for _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_ (1949), an example of Turner’s long shadow on literary studies. _Liminality_ describes the quality of being socially segregated, set apart, and divested of status and relates to characteristics and qualities associated with this condition: indeterminacy, ambiguity, selflessness, and becomingness among them. Though Turner gives the Latin _limen_ as its root, _liminality_’s origins precede the early Bronze Age in the Egyptian word for “port,” “harbor,” “haven,” and “port city”—_mni_—which appears during the second millennium BC in the Middle Kingdom and later becomes transposed into the Greek _limen_, also meaning “harbor.” As Campbell adapted the rite of passage to a Jungian interpretation of myth and fantasy, Turner adapted liminality to the study of religious patterns in...