Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present 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 uvres makes this essential reading for students and specialists alike in the fields of literary studies and cultural studies.

Autorentext

STEFAN HORLACHER Professor of English Literature and Chair of the English Department at Dresden University of Technology, Germany.

STEFAN GLOMB Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Mannheim University, Germany.

LARS HEILER Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures at the University of Kassel, Germany.

Inhalt
PART I: THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES Taboo, Transgression and Literature: An Introduction; S.Horlacher Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective; U.Böker Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective; L.Heiler PART II: LITERARY ANALYSES Hamlet, Macbeth and 'Sovereign Process'; J.Drakakis The Taboo of Revolutionary Thought after 1660 and Strategies of Subversion in Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's The Holy War; J.M.Gurr Worshipping Cloacina in the Eighteenth Century: Functions of Scatology in Swift, Pope, Gay, and Sterne; J.M.Gurr The Organic Uncanny: Taboo, Sexuality and Death in British Gothic Novels; S.Butter & M.Eitelmann The Age of Transition as an Age of Transgression? Victorian Poetry and the Taboo of Sexuality, Love and the Body; S.Heinz Metrical Taboos, Rhythmic Transgressions: Historico-Cultural Manipulations of the Voice in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Poetry; C.Scott 'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda; A.Horatschek Revaluating Transgression in Ulysses; S.Glomb Taboo, Transgression and (Self-)Censorship in Twentieth-Century British Theater; F.Degenring The Holocaust and Aesthetic Transgression in Contemporary British Fiction; L.Heiler