Reviews
In 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.
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.
Pollak writes with clarity, conviction, and precision; she has authored a brilliant book, and literary studies will be richer for it.
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.
Pollak succeeds in reading dialectically the discourse of sex, race, and class in the eighteenth-century novel, skillfully avoiding the traps of reifying categories.
The reading is illuminating, perhaps paradigm-altering... This book should change the way we think about fiction in the future.
Incest and the English Novel makes a strong claim that incest is a nexus of patriarchal power that victimizes women, while its representation in the eighteenth-century novel paradoxically offers liberatory opportunities for them. This is a fine piece of scholarship that has no equal, an intricately argued and theoretically sophisticated book that will make a significant impact on the study of the novel.
Ellen Pollak has written an elegant and savvy book demonstrating that incest lies at the discursive center of modern normative conceptions of gender, sexuality, desire, and social power. No one writing about incest, the eighteenth-century family, or the rise of the novel can do without this book.
The first (and long overdue) full-length study of the topic... Combines a sophisticated theoretical understanding... with a set of rich textual analyses.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction: Modernity, Incest, and Eighteenth-Century Narrative
Chapter 2. Incest and Its Contingencies: Debates in Britain from the Reformation through the Eighteenth
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction: Modernity, Incest, and Eighteenth-Century Narrative
Chapter 2. Incest and Its Contingencies: Debates in Britain from the Reformation through the Eighteenth Century
Chapter 3. Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn's Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister
Chapter 4. Guarding the Succession of the (E)state: Incest and the Dangers of Representation in the Delarivier Manley's The New Atalantis
Chapter 5. Moll Flanders, Incest, and the Structure of Exchange
Chapter 6. Ingesting Incest: Maternity, Textuality, and the Problem of Origins
Chapter 7. Incest and Liberty: Mansfield Park
Notes
Bibliography
Index