Material Transgressions

Material Transgressions reveals how Romantic-era authors think outsideof historical and theoretical ideologies that reiterate notions of sexedbodies, embodied subjectivities, isolated things, or stable texts. The essaysgathered here examine how Romantic writers rethink materiality, especially thesubject-object relationship, in order to challenge the tenets of Enlightenmentand the culture of sensibility that privileged the hegemony of the speaking andfeeling lyric subject and to undo supposedly invariable matter, andrepresentations of it, that limited their writing, agency, knowledge, and evenbeing. In this volume, the idea of transgression serves as a flexible and capaciousdiscursive and material movement that braids together fluid forms of affect,embodiment, and textuality. The texts explored offer alternativeunderstandings of materiality that move beyond concepts that fix genderedbodies and intellectual capacities, whether human or textual, idea or thing. Theyenact processes – assemblages, ghost dances, pack mentality, reiterative writing,shapeshifting, multi-voiced choric oralities – that redefine restrictivestructures in order to craft alternative modes of being in the world that canhelp us to reimagine materiality both in the Romantic period and now. Suchdynamism not only reveals a new materialist imaginary for Romanticism but alsounveils textualities, affects, figurations, and linguistic movements that alternew 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.