Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression

Kathryn Ready is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg. She is volume co-editor of Lumen XLI, co-editor of the collection The Art of Exchange: Models, Forms and Practices of Sociability between Great Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Hermann, 2015) and is also completing a SSHRC-funded monograph project Dissenting Sociability, Romantic Politics, and the Aikin Family Legacy. David Sigler is Professor of English at the University of Calgary, with research interests in British Romanticism, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of Fracture Feminism: The Politics of Impossible Time in British Romanticism (SUNY, 2021) and Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism (McGill-Queen’s, 2015).

• Notes on ContributorsEditors’ Acknowledgments1. Introduction, David Sigler2. Feminising Romantic Sexuality, Perverting Feminine Romanticism, Kathryn Ready3. Reorienting Multi-Dimensional Sex with Objects in Millenium Hall, Kate Singer4. The Necrophilia of Wollstonecraft’s ‘The Cave of Fancy’, David Sigler5. Sexual Violence, Sexual Transgression and the Law in Mary Hays’s The Victim of Prejudice, Kathleen Emily Hurlock6. ‘Thoughts that Breathe and Words that Burn’: Barbauld, Masturbation and the Novel, Kathryn Ready7. Resistive Embodiment and Incestuous Desire in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, Crystal Veronie8. ‘Our Dire Transgression’: Mary Diana Dods in the Biblical Sense, Colin Carman9. George Sand, Indiana and the Transgressive Work of Idealism, Richard C. Sha10. Emily Brontë’s Shelleyan Poetics of Sexual Ambivalence, Amanda Blake Davis11. Primroses in the Porridge: Hareton Earnshaw’s Transgression against his Homosocial Family in Wuthering Heights, Chantel LavoieIndex Index

In this fascinating, thought-provoking anthology, a variety of authors encourage us to “rethink the meaning of transgression” through the lenses of aesthetics, feminist and queer theories, disability studies, and exemplary close readings of women’s writing. [...] Together, all these essays work to interrogate the notion of transgression as it relates to gender. Whether it is through objects, idealized, utopian spaces, self-pleasure, narrative strategies, trans identities, or disruptive normative ideals, these essays invite us to consider not only how female/non-binary writers transgress social norms but, perhaps more importantly, what alternatives they envision.