Romantic Women's Writing and Sexual Transgression

Demonstrates how women's writing formed a crucial, if underappreciated, part of the history of sexuality in the Romantic period Women writers in the Romantic period were reckoning with taboo topics such as female pleasure, masturbation, incest, necrophilia and the aftermaths of sexual violence. Building on recent research on the period's sexual culture, this collection develops a new approach to the study of gender and sexuality within Romanticism. The contributors examine how women writers were theorising perversions in their literary work and often leading transgressive sexual lives themselves. In doing so, the collection challenges current understandings of 'transgression' as a sexual category and shows how the Romantic literary tradition and the history of sexuality in Britain look quite different when one foregrounds the experimental sexual thought of the period's literary women. Kathryn Ready is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, specialising in eighteenth-century and Romantic literary studies, women's literature, and gender and sexuality. She is volume co-editor of Lumen XLI (2023) and co-editor of the collection The Art of Exchange: Models, Forms and Practices of Sociability between Great Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (2015). David Sigler is Professor of English at the University of Calgary, Canada, 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 (2021) and Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism (2015).