{"title":"John Barnet and the Materiality of Desire in James Hogg’s Justified Sinner","authors":"David Sigler","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.15","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines a neglected scene in James Hogg’s novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in which the church groundskeeper John Barnet is fired for insubordination. Barnet, like an earlier version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” makes innuendoes about his employer’s sexual history and refuses to deny spreading rumors about the paternity of the boss’s son. The ensuing confrontation becomes an allegory of labour relations and a parable about the materiality of desire. The chapter analyzes Barnet’s innuendo through the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, who similarly saw desire as having a certain materiality.","PeriodicalId":399237,"journal":{"name":"Material Transgressions","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116530728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voices against the Universe:","authors":"M. Lussier","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.18","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":399237,"journal":{"name":"Material Transgressions","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121153337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dancing with Ghosts in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’","authors":"Sonia Hofkosh","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.13","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reads the intimacy between persons and things dramatized in Keats’s poem as a haunting that at once enacts and acts against normative states of being or orders of experience. Drawing on Hazlitt’s invocation of the past as “alive and stirring with objects” in conjunction with the political resonance of the ghost dance Gayatri Spivak summons in her response to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, this reading aims to depathologize Isabella’s intense attachment to the pot of basil by reflecting on the potential for resistance or transformation within the practices of everyday life, including within the repetitions and returns that constitute our own everyday practices as readers of Keats’s poem.","PeriodicalId":399237,"journal":{"name":"Material Transgressions","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131127309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revolutionary Objects in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art","authors":"Mark Lounibos","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.12","url":null,"abstract":"Following a feminist/materialist concept of “choratic reading,” this chapter argues that Elizabeth Inchbald's English Jacobin novel Nature and Art highlights environmental agency in the context of political and social injustice. Inchbald’s use of chiasmic irony further reveals how the disavowal of non-human agency acts as the very condition for exploitation of both non-human and human actors, particularly the unpaid menial, reproductive and nutritive work of women in late-eighteenth-century England. In this sense, there is nothing more “environmental” than the laboring, gendered, and exploited female body. This chapter suggests that future study of Inchbald focus on the networks of human and non-human agents in her work and how these networks gesture towards a radical political ecology.","PeriodicalId":399237,"journal":{"name":"Material Transgressions","volume":"411 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115238946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Phantasmion, or the Confessions of a Female Opium Eater","authors":"D. Ruwe","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.17","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyzes the female opium narrative through a comparison of Sara Coleridge’s children’s novel Phantasmion and the texts of De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Phantasmion, the first fairy tale novel in English, explores the fluidity of the physical body through the travails of its hero, Prince Phantasmion. He metamorphoses into insects, falls into vision states, and finally comes into his own in a climactic scene in which he carries the dead body of his mother out of a sand trap. Part insect narrative, part opium text, and part guilt-ridden maternal autobiography, Phantasmion exemplifies Teresa Brennan’s concepts of entrainment and the transmission of affect. This essay begins with a discussion of the maternal body and opium use, with a focus on Coleridge’s breastfeeding diaries and her verse for children. The second section links the novel’s use of insect poetics and physical metamorphoses to Jane Bennett’s ideas about the vibrancy of matter. The concluding section explores the autobiographical elements of Phantasmion as well as its use of a particular opium involute that was inspired by Martin Dobrizhoffer’s account of his time among the Guarani people of Paraguay. As Coleridge repeats this involute throughout her text, the hero Phantasmion gradually comes to understand his own human frailty.","PeriodicalId":399237,"journal":{"name":"Material Transgressions","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128661327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Queer:","authors":"K. Singer","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":399237,"journal":{"name":"Material Transgressions","volume":"586 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123935531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Destabilizing Materiality of the Autograph for Blake, Coleridge, and Tighe","authors":"H. Linkin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13qftr6.6","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter looks at three poets—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Tighe—who integrate print and manuscript technologies to produce a new materiality in autographic texts that capture their idiolectic voices. They deploy scribal practices in print media to inscribe individuality, autographing the print copies of their works to transform them from uniform products into objects embodying vital processes. Illuminated printing enables Blake to make each copy of his texts a unique graphic object, most expansively in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Coleridge’s habitual revision of his printed texts destabilizes each version to re-engage the immediacy of poetic vision through a vocalized experience, most dramatically in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Tighe initially rejects print publication for the affective palpability of scribal publication but then inscribes privately printed copies of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love to specific members of her coterie, a process her coterie continues after Tighe dies. All three explore the implications of being bound in bookish or human form in their poems even as they use the materiality of their autographic texts to reconfigure a print publication system that might otherwise lock them or their texts into fixed identities or commodities.","PeriodicalId":399237,"journal":{"name":"Material Transgressions","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115883781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}