"Its range--both chronological and methodological--as well as the consistently high quality of its essays makes this collection stand out. A timely and important collection . . . on literary representations of incest [that will] become the touchstone for further work in the field."--Teresa A. Goddu, Vanderbilt University "These original and provocative essays fill a significant gap in our literary histories of sex and gender."--Bruce Burgett, University of Washington, Bothell This wide-ranging collection tracks the contradictory roles of incest in Anglo-American literature, politics, and culture from the Middle Ages, a period Elizabeth Barnes states is considered unrivaled for its "unblinking acceptance of many varieties of incest," to the present. Barnes explicates the role of incest in Anglo-American literature and culture, and in doing so sheds new light on the familiar story of incest as a vice of barbarians and a privilege of the elite. This unprecedented critical treatment of the subject speaks comprehensively to the greater attention placed on the occurrence of incest in the last several decades even as it provides a critical grasp of the topic from complex theoretical and historically nuanced perspectives. The essays range across a variety of methodological approaches--including psychoanalytic, cultural-historical, biographical, and queer theoretical. In this seminal work in the field, Elizabeth Barnes clarifies the role of literature as a privileged site for the inquiry into incest. She links literature's ability to "tell trauma"--a theoretical issue of the book--to the personal, political, and cultural approaches to incest that the volume addresses. The result is a collection, unlike many of such broad scope, whose essays flow seamlessly and coherently from one focus to the next. Contents Part I. The Royal Privilege of Incest 1. "Worse Than Bogery": Incest Stories in Middle English Literature, by Elizabeth Archibald 2. Incest and Authority in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, by Susan Frye 3. Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi, by Frank Whigham 4. Incest and Class: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and the Borgias, by Lisa Hopkins Part II. The Fall of the Fathers 5. The Ambivalence of Nature's Law: Representations of Incest in Dryden and His English Contemporaries, by T.G.A. Nelson 6. Natural and National Unions: Incest and Sympathy in the Early Republic, by Elizabeth Barnes 7. Temperance in the Bed of a Child: Incest and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America, by Karen Sanchez-Eppler Part III. The Silence of the Daughters 8. Incest in the Story of Tancredi: Christine de Pizan's Poetics of Euphemism, by Elizabeth Allen 9. "Don't Say Such Foolish Things, Dear": Speaking Incest in The Voyage Out, by Jen Shelton 10. "Father, Don't You See I'm Burning?": Identification and Remembering in H.D.'s World War II Writing, by Madelyn Detloff Part IV. Incest in the House of Culture 11. Telling Fact from Fiction: Dorothy Allison's Disciplinary Stories, by Gillian Harkins 12. "Hereisthehouse": Cultural Spaces of Incest in The Bluest Eye, by Minrose C. Gwin 13. Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Therapeutic Culture, by Ann Cvetkovich 14. The New Face of Incest?: Race, Class, and the Controversy over Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, by Mako Yoshikawa Elizabeth L. Barnes is associate professor of English at the College of William and Mary.

Incest is a remarkably frequent theme in medieval literature; it occurs in a wide range of genres, including romances, saints's lives, and exempla. Historically, the Church in the later Middle Ages was very concerned about breaches of the complex laws against incest, which was defined very broadly at the time to cover family relationships outside the nuclear family and also spiritual relationships through baptism. Medieval writers accepted that incestuous desire was a widespread phenomenon among women as well as men. They are surprisingly open about incest, though of course they disapprove of it; in many exemplary stories incest is identified with original sin, but the moral emphasizes the importance of contrition and the availability of grace even to such heinous sinners. This study begins with a brief account of the development of medieval incest laws, and the extent to which they were obeyed. Next comes a survey of classical incest stories and their legacy; many were retold in the Middle Ages, but they were frequently adapted to the purposes of Christian moralizers. In the three chapters that follow, homegrown medieval incest stories are grouped by relationship: mother-son (focusing on the Gregorius legend), father-daughter (focusing on La Manekine and its analogues), and sibling (focusing on the Arthurian legend). The final chapter considers the very common medieval trope of the Virgin Mary as mother, daughter, sister and bride of Christ, the one exception to the incest taboo. In western society today, incest has recently been recognized as a serious social problem, and has also become a frequent theme in both fiction and non-fiction, just as it was in the Middle Ages. This interdisciplinary study is the first broad survey of medieval incest stories in Latin and the vernaculars (mainly French, English and German). It situates the incest theme in both literary and cultural contexts, and offers many thought-provoking comparisons and contrasts to our own society in terms of gender relations, the power of patriarchy, the role of religious institutions in regulating morality, and the relationship between life and literature.

This is the first edited collection of essays which focuses on the incest taboo and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day. It considers a number of key authors and artists, rather than a single author from this period. The collection exposes the wide use of incest and sexual trauma, and the frequency this appears within contemporary literature and related arts. Incest in contemporary literature discusses the impact of this change in attitudes on literature and literary adaptations in the latter half of the twentieth century, and early years of the twenty-first century. Although primarily concerned with fiction, the collection includes work on television and film. Authors discussed include Iain Banks, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, Ian McEwan Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrea Newman and Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath.

This book explores the intersections of sexualized, gendered, and racialized traumas in five US novels about father-daughter incest from the 1990s. It examines how incest can be connected to wider past and present structural oppression and institutional abuse, and what fiction looks like that testifies against and references a historical background of slavery, poverty, settler colonialism, annexation, and immigration. Investigating the means of resistance used against attempts at silencing and denial in these texts, the book also shows how contemporary women’s novels can propose social change. Overall, this study uniquely argues that the individual trauma of incest in these texts must be understood in relation to histories of and present collective wounding against marginalized communities. By sitting at the intersections between trauma theory and US third world feminism, it allows for theory to meet literary activism.

The first collection focused on the writing of provocative author and performance artist Sapphire, including her groundbreaking novel PUSH that has since become the Academy-award-winning film Precious.

An investigation of the motif of the unspeakable as manifested in a wide range of medieval texts, from the Exeter Book to Chaucer.

Beowulf's presence on the popular cultural radar has increased in the past two decades, coincident with cultural crisis and change. Why? By way of a fusion of cultural studies, adaptation theory, and monster theory, Beowulf's Popular Afterlife examines a wide range of Anglo-American retellings and appropriations found in literary texts, comic books, and film. The most remarkable feature of popular adaptations of the poem is that its monsters, frequently victims of organized militarism, male aggression, or social injustice, are provided with strong motives for their retaliatory brutality. Popular adaptations invert the heroic ideology of the poem, and monsters are not only created by powerful men but are projections of their own pathological behavior. At the same time there is no question that the monsters created by human malfeasance must be eradicated.