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

Hardcover, vi + 269 pages, NOT ex-library. Book is clean and bright with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Boards show gentle handling wear, short creases to corners. Issued without a dust jacket. -- Contents: Part I Theoretical and Historical Perspectives 1 Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction / Stefan Horlacher; 2 Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective / Uwe Böker [The Taboo: General Remarks; Taboo and the Agents of Social Control and Censorship; Types of Taboo: Discursive Changes and Historical Developments (Taboo of Sexuality; Death Taboo; Taboo in a Multicultural Society)]; 3 Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective / Lars Heiler [Shakespeare's English Histories; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels; William Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Doppelgänger Text as Licensed Transgression: Stevenson, Wilde, Conrad; Censorship and Transgression in Contemporary Literature]; Part II Literary Analyses 4 Hamlet, Macbeth, and 'Sovereign Process' / John Drakakis [Desire and Excess; King Duncan; Language of Macbeth; The Nature of Nature]; 5 Taboo of Revolutionary Thought after 1660 and Strategies of Subversion in Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Holy War / Jens Martin Gurr [Restoration, Censorship, and the Submerged Tradition of Radicalism; Coded Republicanism in Paradise Lost; Bunyan, The Holy War, and the Stuart Monarchy in the Early 1680s]; 6 Worshipping Cloacina in the 18th Century: Functions of Scatology in Swift, Pope, Gay, and Sterne / Jens Martin Gurr [Taboo of Excretion in the 18th Century; Madness, Misogyny, or Misanthropy?: Potential Functions of Scatology in Swift and Others; Concrete Contexts: Intellectual and Moral Pretensions of Enlightened Anthropological Optimism; Conclusion]; 7 The Organic Uncanny: Taboo, Sexuality, and Death in British Gothic Novels / Stella Butter & Matthias Eitelmann [School of Horror: Lewis's Visceral Gothic; School of Terror: Ann Radcliffe's 'Polite Gothic'; New Gothic: Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop (1967)]; 8 Age of Transition as an Age of Transgression? Victorian Poetry and the Taboo of Sexuality, Love, and the Body / Sarah Heinz [Theoretical Background: Violating and Reestablishing Taboo by Transgression; Victorian Poetry: Mobility and Constraint; 'My Life Is Bitter with Thy Love': Sexuality, Love, and the Body; Conclusion]; 9 Metrical Taboos, Rhythmic Transgressions: Historico-Cultural Manipulations of the Voice in 19th- & 20th-Century Poetry / Clive Scott [Preliminaries: Voice, Meter, Rhythm; Episodes from the 19th Century: Wordsworth, Hopkins, Henley; Directions in the Twentieth Century: Pound, Lawrence, Eliot]; 10 'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda / Anna-Margaretha Horatschek; 11 Revaluating Transgression in Ulysses / Stefan Glomb; 12 Taboo, Transgression, and (Self-)Censorship in Twentieth-Century British Theater / Folkert Degenring; 13 Holocaust and Aesthetic Transgression in Contemporary British Fiction / Lars Heiler; Editors and Contributors; Index -- The book develops 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. …