Description
Book SynopsisExtreme States traces the evolution of American transgressive fiction from the 1960s to 2000, exploring how transgressive fiction reflects, exaggerates and critically interrogates how central American ideologies are perpetually (re)constructed in its extra-textual context.
Trade ReviewIs transgression only about breaking the rules, or is it also creative and reconstitutive, part of a perpetual reconfiguration of American culture? Is it about style, or is it about ideas? Coco d’Hont, in her study of American fiction since the 1960s, helps us see transgression as violation, creation, and ideology.
—Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham
"Transgression as a concept involves so much more than the cliché of that which is outré or titillating, usually understood in sexual or aesthetic terms. At last, with Extreme States, we have a monograph that explores the ways in which the crossing of borders, boundaries, and categories is both central to much recent American fiction, and key to understanding the contemporary American ideological imaginary."
—Lisa Downing, University of Birmingham
Table of ContentsPreface
1 Dead in the Water? Reading Transgression as a Central Social Mechanism
Moving Beyond Marginality: (Re)defining Transgression
A Perverse Society? Transgression and American Culture
The Body of Work: What Is Transgressive Fiction?
A History of Transgression: Case Studies
2 Too Much Filth to Handle: Pornography and Capitalism in Hogg
Dirt, Sex and Violence: Breaking Through the Surface
Wandering Around the Wasteland: An Alternative America
Constructing Mainstream Marginality: Racism, Homophobia and Misogyny
The (S)innocent Child: The Nuclear Family and Morality
3 Saving the West: Environmentalism and Conservatism in The Monkey Wrench Gang
A Modern-Day Thoreau: An Environmentalist History
Maintenance through Destruction: Saving the American West
Reinventing the Vigilante: Masculinity as Activist Vehicle
The West as a Playing Field: Narrative Distortion and Critical Exploration
4 A Painful Past: Rememory, Monstrosity and Intersectionality in Beloved
A Ghost From the Past: Uncomfortable Histories
Monsters and Reconstruction: Learning from the Past
Half-formed Things: Building Gendered and Ethnic Identities
Under Construction: Fluid Freedoms
5 The Perfect Neoliberal: The Corporate and the Corporeal in American Psycho
Consuming Objects: Commodity Fetishism and the Corporeal
The Power of the Corporeal: Corporate Instability
Chasing the Cipher: Bodily Violation as Critical Interrogation
Reinventing Neoliberalism: Crisis and Regeneration
6 Wild Men: Freedom and Masculinity in Fight Club
Infected Masculinity: Reforming Capitalism through the Male Body
Infecting Society: Project Mayhem as Social Disease
Rethinking the Ethics of Physicality: Gender and the Politics of Illness
The End of Freedom? The Return of the Limit
7 "This Is Not an Exit": The (Non) Death of Transgression
From Safety Valve to Critical Exploration: Transgressive Fiction as a Fictional Lab
The Mind-Body Problem: Connecting Ideology and Physicality
Moving beyond Boundaries: Transgressive Fiction After the Turn of the Century
No Future? The Continued Importance of Transgressive Fiction
Index
