Material Transgressions

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.

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Material 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.