Manchester University Press Incest in Contemporary Literature

This is the first edited collection of essays to focus on the taboo of incest and its literary and cultural presentation from the 1950s to the present day. It considers a number of key authors and artists, and reveals the wide and frequent use of incest and sexual trauma within contemporary literature, television and film. This study discusses the impact of a 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 related arts. It will enhance the growing academic interest in trauma narratives and taboo-literature, offering a useful contribution to a fast-evolving field of artistic criticism which is concerned with the relationship between social issues and creativity. The critical introduction gives an overview of recent real-life events, fictional works, and a variety of interpretive readings, and asks how and why literature and the visual arts responded in a variety of ways to trauma. 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, Pier Pasolini and Sylvia Plath. The collection is accessible to all in the academy including undergraduates, postgraduates and established academics and will be a core resource for those working in this area.