Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Exceeding a limit or boundary, especially of social acceptability.
  • adjective Of or relating to a genre of fiction, filmmaking, or art characterized by graphic depictions of behavior that violate socially acceptable norms, often involving violence, drug use, and sexual deviancy.
  • adjective Of or relating to geological transgression.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Inclined or apt to transgress; faulty; sinful; culpable.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Disposed or tending to transgress; faulty; culpable.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Involving transgression; that passes beyond some limit; sinful.
  • adjective Going beyond generally accepted boundaries; violating usual practice, subversive.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From transgress.

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Examples

  • It adds to the discomfiture that this soft-spoken ex-journalist -- who cheerfully labels his work "transgressive" -- looks uncannily like Anthony Perkins circa Psycho.

    JAM! Showbiz 2008

  • It adds to the discomfiture that this soft-spoken ex-journalist -- who cheerfully labels his work "transgressive" -- looks uncannily like Anthony Perkins circa Psycho.

    JAM! Showbiz 2008

  • It adds to the discomfiture that this soft-spoken ex-journalist -- who cheerfully labels his work "transgressive" -- looks uncannily like Anthony Perkins circa Psycho.

    JAM! Showbiz 2008

  • Shakespeare, who understood this best, subtitled his transgressive play What You Will.

    In praise of … Twelfth Night | Editorial 2011

  • Shakespeare, who understood this best, subtitled his transgressive play What You Will'.

    In praise of … Twelfth Night | Editorial 2011

  • Aliens – one which has been described as transgressive, and the other which is a delightful family romp.

    Buzzine » Reese Witherspoon & Seth Rogen 2009

  • They tap into our adolescent power fantasies; their hollow-point bloodshed seems transgressive, which is why video games are to this century what rock 'n' roll was to the last.

    The Glory of the Shooter 2006

  • Both she and The Duchess of Nothing itself are much more convincingly "transgressive" of established norms -- of female behavior and of conventional "psychological realism" -- than other novels sometimes accorded that label.

    Point of View in Fiction 2009

  • Notwithstanding that most of them were "transgressive," when at all, in rather tepid and formally uninteresting ways, I simply was unable to understand what they shared in common that made them "interfictions."

    Experimental Fiction 2010

  • The former might be called "transgressive" experiments that overrun the extant boundaries observed by most readers, critics, and other writers, while the latter might be regarded as "local" experiments that challenge "normal" practice but do so from within the boundary that otherwise marks off the still-familiar from the disconcertingly new.

    Experimental Fiction 2010

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    July 10, 2020