Preface
1 Dead in the Water? Reading Transgression as a Central Social Mechanism
Moving Beyond Marginality: (Re)defining Transgression
A Perverse Society? Transgression and American Culture
The Body of Work: What Is Transgressive Fiction?
A History of Transgression: Case Studies
2 Too Much Filth to Handle: Pornography and Capitalism in Hogg
Dirt, Sex and Violence: Breaking Through the Surface
Wandering Around the Wasteland: An Alternative America
Constructing Mainstream Marginality: Racism, Homophobia and Misogyny
The (S)innocent Child: The Nuclear Family and Morality
3 Saving the West: Environmentalism and Conservatism in The Monkey Wrench Gang
A Modern-Day Thoreau: An Environmentalist History
Maintenance through Destruction: Saving the American West
Reinventing the Vigilante: Masculinity as Activist Vehicle
The West as a Playing Field: Narrative Distortion and Critical Exploration
4 A Painful Past: Rememory, Monstrosity and Intersectionality in Beloved
A Ghost From the Past: Uncomfortable Histories
Monsters and Reconstruction: Learning from the Past
Half-formed Things: Building Gendered and Ethnic Identities
Under Construction: Fluid Freedoms
5 The Perfect Neoliberal: The Corporate and the Corporeal in American Psycho
Consuming Objects: Commodity Fetishism and the Corporeal
The Power of the Corporeal: Corporate Instability
Chasing the Cipher: Bodily Violation as Critical Interrogation
Reinventing Neoliberalism: Crisis and Regeneration
6 Wild Men: Freedom and Masculinity in Fight Club
Infected Masculinity: Reforming Capitalism through the Male Body
Infecting Society: Project Mayhem as Social Disease
Rethinking the Ethics of Physicality: Gender and the Politics of Illness
The End of Freedom? The Return of the Limit
7 This Is Not an Exit: The (Non) Death of Transgression
From Safety Valve to Critical Exploration: Transgressive Fiction as a Fictional Lab
The Mind-Body Problem: Connecting Ideology and Physicality
Moving beyond Boundaries: Transgressive Fiction After the Turn of the Century
No Future? The Continued Importance of Transgressive Fiction
Index
