Kathryn Ready and David Sigler's Romantic Women's Writing and Sexual Transgression

David Sigler's Introduction to Romantic Women's Writing and Sexual Transgression – a collection of eleven chapters, edited by Sigler and Kathryn Ready – pitches the transgression of the title not as an absolute rejection of existing norms but rather a controlled testing of the limits of things as they are, yielding a practical experiment in what might be otherwise. This is an important refinement of transgression's apparently defining absolutism, as Sigler points out and as many of the chapters investigate, because '[s]exual transgression is part of the taboo and works in parallel with it to organise violence; it is never outside or beyond any boundary, and does not aspire to be' (6). While this definition of transgression might seem to cede dissent to total regulation (Foucault) or inescapable law (Bataille), it nonetheless enables a less paranoid, more tactical understanding (for the writer) of 'sexual transgression as a special province of writerly transgression' with its own 'procedures of resistance' (5), and (for the critic) of '"sexual transgression" as an interpretive framework' (6).