Description
Book SynopsisMaterial Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outside of historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexed bodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The essays gathered here examine how Romantic writers rethink materiality, especially the subject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenment and the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking and feeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, and representations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and even being. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capacious discursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect, embodiment, and textuality. The texts explored offer alternative understandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix gendered bodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. They enact processes – assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing, shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities – that redefine restrictive structures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that can help us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Such dynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but also unveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alter new materialism’s often strictly ontological approach.
List of contributors: Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, Suzanne L. Barnett, Harriet Kramer Linkin, Michael Gamer, Katrina O’Loughlin, Emily J. Dolive, Holly Gallagher, Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Mary Beth Tegan, Mark Lounibos, Sonia Hofkosh, David Sigler, Chris Washington, Donelle Ruwe, Mark Lussier.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Living in a New Material World
Kate Singer, Ashley Cross, and Suzanne L. Barnett
I. Textual Embodiments
Destabilizing Materiality Through Manuscript Culture in Blake, Coleridge, and Tighe
Harriet Kramer Linkin Affect in the Margins: Marking Readers in the
Elegiac SonnetsMichael Gamer and Katrina O’LoughlinRemapping the Printed Page in Women’s Post-Waterloo Poetry
Emily DoliveVibrant Art on the Grand Tour in Anna Jameson’s
Diary of an EnnuyéeHolly GallagherII. Transgressive Things
Hester Stanhope, '
Un être à part': Material Transgression and Belonging in the East
Jillian Heydt-Stevenson‘The Redundancy of Copious Nothings': Fictional Offspring and the Reproductions of Female Vanity
Mary Beth TeganRevolutionary Objects in Elizabeth Inchbald’s
Nature and ArtMark LounibosDancing with Ghosts in 'Isabella; or The Pot of Basil'
Sonia HofkoshIt’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Queer: Mary Shelley, Affect, and Shapeshifting through
The Last ManKate SingerIII. Materialities Sexual & AnimalVoices against the Universe: Material Transgressions in the Blakean Multiverse
Mark LussierJohn Barnet and the Materiality of Desire in James Hogg’s
Justified SinnerDavid SiglerPhantasmion, or the Confessions of a Female Opium Eater
Donelle RuweWerewolf Wollstonecraft:
homo homini lupus, or Romantic Beast Wars
Chris Washington
