Description
Book SynopsisFirmly establishing the importance of the topic for understanding eighteenth-century English literature and culture, her work is bound to spur further discussion of the significance of incest discourses in the early modern period and beyond.
Trade ReviewIn this imaginative and provocative study, the relationship between gender, incest and fiction is explored through a series of cultural, materialist and psychoanalytic readings of texts. -- Alison Stenton Times Literary Supplement 2004 Pollak's remarkable book has qualities typical of the best scholarly criticism: a thorough and assured grasp of the history and current discussions of the topic; the capacity to forcefully assert its own place in those discussions; and elegant movement between close readings and broader implications. Choice 2004 Pollak writes with clarity, conviction, and precision; she has authored a brilliant book, and literary studies will be richer for it. -- Alison Conway Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2005 Pollak's book is well worth reading for its illuminating analyses of individual novels; but it also does modern women a real service by using these close readings to denaturalize our false, present-day assumptions about incest. -- Eve Tavor South Atlantic Review 2005 Pollak succeeds in reading dialectically the discourse of sex, race, and class in the eighteenth-century novel, skillfully avoiding the traps of reifying categories. -- Ros Ballaster Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 2006 The reading is illuminating, perhaps paradigm-altering... This book should change the way we think about fiction in the future. Eighteenth-Century Current Bibliography 2007
Table of ContentsContents: Acknowledgments1 Introduction: Modernity, Incest, and Eighteenth-Century Narrative 2 Incest and Its Contingencies: Debates in Britain from the Reformation through the Eighteenth Century 3 Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn's Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister 4 Guarding the Succession of the (E)state: Incest and the Dangers of Representation in the Delarivier Manley's The New Atalantis 5 Moll Flanders, Incest, and the Structure of Exchange 6 Ingesting Incest: Maternity, Textuality, and the Problem of Origins 7 Incest and Liberty: Mansfield Park Notes Bibliography Index
