Everybody's family romance : reading incest in neoliberal America / Gillian Harkins.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harkins, Gillian.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Incest in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (338 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the 1990's, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody's Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century. Harkins's interdisciplinary approach reveals how women's narratives about incest were co-opted by-and yet retained resistant strains against-the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. A

Contents:

Preface: Nobody's home

Introduction: Everybody's family romance

Laying down the law: the modernization of American incest

Legal fantasies: populist trauma and the theater of memory

Seduction by literature: sexual property and testimonial possession

Surviving the family romance? Realism and the labor of incest

Consensual relations: the scattered generations of kinship

Conclusion: beyond the incest taboo

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-8166-7057-9

OCLC:

593356105