Extreme States

Coco d’Hont is an independent scholar who researches contemporary American fiction and popular culture. She holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia (UK). Recent projects include explorations of Marilyn Manson, published in the European Journal of American Studies, Mary Harron’s American Psycho, and Chuck Palahniuk’s post-9/11 fiction.

Is transgression only about breaking the rules, or is it also creative and reconstitutive, part of a perpetual reconfiguration of American culture? Is it about style, or is it about ideas? Coco d’Hont, in her study of American fiction since the 1960s, helps us see transgression as violation, creation, and ideology.—Christopher Phelps, University of Nottingham"Transgression as a concept involves so much more than the cliché of that which is outré or titillating, usually understood in sexual or aesthetic terms. At last, with Extreme States, we have a monograph that explores the ways in which the crossing of borders, boundaries, and categories is both central to much recent American fiction, and key to understanding the contemporary American ideological imaginary." —Lisa Downing, University of Birmingham

• Preface1 Dead in the Water? Reading Transgression as a Central Social Mechanism Moving Beyond Marginality: (Re)defining TransgressionA Perverse Society? Transgression and American CultureThe Body of Work: What Is Transgressive Fiction? A History of Transgression: Case Studies2 Too Much Filth to Handle: Pornography and Capitalism in Hogg Dirt, Sex and Violence: Breaking Through the SurfaceWandering Around the Wasteland: An Alternative AmericaConstructing Mainstream Marginality: Racism, Homophobia and MisogynyThe (S)innocent Child: The Nuclear Family and Morality3 Saving the West: Environmentalism and Conservatism in The Monkey Wrench GangA Modern-Day Thoreau: An Environmentalist History Maintenance through Destruction: Saving the American WestReinventing the Vigilante: Masculinity as Activist VehicleThe West as a Playing Field: Narrative Distortion and Critical Exploration4 A Painful Past: Rememory, Monstrosity and Intersectionality in BelovedA Ghost From the Past: Uncomfortable HistoriesMonsters and Reconstruction: Learning from the PastHalf-formed Things: Building Gendered and Ethnic IdentitiesUnder Construction: Fluid Freedoms5 The Perfect Neoliberal: The Corporate and the Corporeal in American PsychoConsuming Objects: Commodity Fetishism and the CorporealThe Power of the Corporeal: Corporate InstabilityChasing the Cipher: Bodily Violation as Critical InterrogationReinventing Neoliberalism: Crisis and Regeneration6 Wild Men: Freedom and Masculinity in Fight ClubInfected Masculinity: Reforming Capitalism through the Male BodyInfecting Society: Project Mayhem as Social DiseaseRethinking the Ethics of Physicality: Gender and the Politics of IllnessThe End of Freedom? The Return of the Limit7 "This Is Not an Exit": The (Non) Death of TransgressionFrom Safety Valve to Critical Exploration: Transgressive Fiction as a Fictional LabThe Mind-Body Problem: Connecting Ideology and PhysicalityMoving beyond Boundaries: Transgressive Fiction After the Turn of the CenturyNo Future? The Continued Importance of Transgressive FictionIndex