Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things(11 Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850)

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Living in a New Material WorldKate 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 Sonnets Michael Gamer and Katrina O’Loughlin Remapping the Printed Page in Women’s Post-Waterloo Poetry Emily Dolive Vibrant Art on the Grand Tour in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée Holly Gallagher II. 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 VanityMary Beth Tegan Revolutionary Objects in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art Mark Lounibos Dancing with Ghosts in 'Isabella; or The Pot of Basil' Sonia Hofkosh It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Queer: Mary Shelley, Affect, and Shapeshifting through The Last ManKate Singer III. Materialities Sexual & Animal Voices against the Universe: Material Transgressions in the Blakean Multiverse Mark Lussier John Barnet and the Materiality of Desire in James Hogg’s Justified Sinner David Sigler Phantasmion, or the Confessions of a Female Opium Eater Donelle Ruwe Werewolf Wollstonecraft: homo homini lupus, or Romantic Beast Wars Chris Washington

About the Author :
Kate Singer is Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Ashley Cross is Professor of English at Manhattan College. Suzanne L. Barnett is an independent scholar.