Boundaries, Limits, Taboos: Transgression in Romanticism

Romanticism – an era of rebellion, of overreachers revolting against previous generations' conventions of taste, style and morals. Romantics made transgression their badge of honour and prided themselves on the desecration of formerly canonised laws. The repercussions of these meaningful and consequential trespasses are explored in unique ways in their texts.

Having gathered thirteen papers given at the 2019 joint conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER) and the International Association of Byron Societies (IABS) at the University of Vechta, this essay collection examines the extent to which boundaries were crossed, permeated and violated. The boundaries between Orient and Occident, humanity and the animal world, subject and object, fictional and factual and even life and death, all of which were contemplated by selected authors of English and German Romanticism, are of particular interest.

Contents

List of Figures ............................................................................................................. vii

Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... ix

SWANTJE VAN MARK AND NORBERT LENNARTZ
Transgression in Romanticism: Some Introductory Remarks ........................................ 1

RICHARD LANSDOWN
Appetite and Deeds, War and the Will:
Faustian Transgression in Byron's The Deformed Transformed .................................... 9

DIEGO SAGLIA
Of Flesh and Boundaries:
Transgressing Gaps and Orifices in Romantic Orientalism ......................................... 25

MARVIN REIMANN
Byron's The Giaour : Dismantling the Boundaries
between Orient and Occident through Romantic Irony ................................................ 41

SOPHIA MÖLLERS
The Historian Turned Anatomist of the Soul:
Tracing Transgressive Psychology in William Godwin's Mandeville .......................... 59

ALEXANDRA BÖHM
Transgressive Encounters: Sympathy with Animals in John Aikin
and Anna Laetitia Barbauld's Evenings at Home and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's „Rime of the Ancyent Marinere“ ................................ 71

IAN DUNCAN
Imps of the Perverse: Romantic Fiction and Antinomian Denial ................................. 91

ALEXANDER SCHLUTZ
„A poor, imprisoned animal.“ Persons, Property,
and the Unnatural Nature of the Law in E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Entail .................... 103

SEBASTIAN DOMSCH
Transgressing (Story)Worlds: Polidori, Byron, and The Vampyre ............................. 115

JONATHAN GROSS
„No hopes for them as laughs “: William Beckford in the Margins
of Robert Southey's and Lord Byron's Visions of Judgement .................................... 125

DENISE GIGANTE
Transgressing the Sacred Frontier of Culture ............................................................. 147

RICHARD C. SHA
Can Transgression Be Meaningful Even After It Is Required or Expected? .............. 165

NICHOLAS ROE
Transgressive Biography ........................................................................................... 183

KASAHARA YORIMICHI
Croly's Dying Warrior:
The Roman Gladiator That Crossed the Boundary and Turned into Arminius .......... 199

List of Contributors .................................................................................................... 213