Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present

by Horlacher, Stefan; Glomb, Stefan; Heiler, Lars

• ISBN13: 9780230619906
• ISBN10: 0230619908
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Presentdevelops an innovative overview of the interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic that have emerged in recent years. Alongside exemplary model analyses of key periods and representative primary texts, this exciting new anthology of critical essays has been specifically designed to fill a major gap in the field of literary and cultural studies. This book traces the complex dynamic and ongoing negotiation of notions of transgression and taboo as an essential, though often neglected, facet to understanding the development, production, and conception of literature from the early modern Elizabethan period through postmodern debates. The combination of a broad theoretical and historical framework covering almost fifty representative authors and oeuvres makes this essential reading for students and specialists alike in the fields of literary studies and cultural studies.

Author Biography

Stefan Horlacher is Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Department at Dresden University of Technology. His Conceptions of Masculinity in the Works of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence (2006, in German), won the Postdoctoral Award of the German Associa­tion of Professors of English.

Stefan Glomb is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Mannheim University. He is the author of Memory and Identity in Contemporary British Drama and the co-editor (with Stefan Horlacher) of Beyond Extremes: The Representation of and Reflexion on Processes of Modernization in the Contemporary British Novel.

Lars Heiler is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures at the University of Kassel. He is the author of Regression and Cultural Critique in the Contemporary British Novel (2004, in German) and the forthcoming Literature and Therapy: Precarious Negotiations.

Table of Contents

Theoretical and Historical Perspectives
Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction	p. 3
Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective	p. 23
Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective	p. 49
Literary Analyses
Hamlet, Macbeth, and 'Sovereign Process'	p. 75
The Taboo of Revolutionary Thought after 1660 and Strategies of Subversion in Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Holy War	p. 99
Worshipping Cloacina in the Eighteenth Century: Functions of Scatology in Swift, Pope, Gay, and Sterne	p. 117
The Organic Uncanny: Taboo, Sexuality, and Death in British Gothic Novels	p. 135
The Age of Transition as an Age of Transgression? Victorian Poetry and the Taboo of Sexuality, Love, and the Body	p. 159
Metrical Taboos, Rhythmic Transgressions: Historico-Cultural Manipulations of the Voice in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Poetry	p. 177
'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's	p. 193
Revaluating Transgression in Ulysses	p. 211
Taboo, Transgression, and (Self-)Censorship in Twentieth-Century British Theater	p. 227
The Holocaust and Aesthetic Transgression in Contemporary British Fiction	p. 243
Editors and Contributors	p. 259
Index	p. 263
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